


things left behind and the things that are ahead

by fluffernutter8



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Spoilers, F/M, Family, Fluff and Angst, One Shot Collection, ♫ takin' care of business ♪
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-05
Updated: 2020-02-09
Packaged: 2020-02-26 14:36:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 35
Words: 100,146
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18719065
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fluffernutter8/pseuds/fluffernutter8
Summary: Steve goes back. Some things are the same. Some are different.





	1. 1949-1952

The problem with deciding not to come back from returning the stones is that he has no one to consult about what exactly that means. Bucky, the only one who knows, the only one who guessed, has no expertise in quantum physics or advice about what exactly he’ll be doing to the timeline.

“You’re taking all the stupid with you,” he’d said, and part of what he meant was this: _going off half-cocked as always, Rogers. Seat of your goddamn pants._ He isn’t wrong about that part. For a strategist, Steve spends a lot of his time winging it.

(He tries not to miss Sam. He misses Sam.)

Even once he’s taken the leap, used the Pym particles to land himself so far back that he’ll only make it to the twenty-first century again by living through until then, he doesn’t precisely know what to do about it all. He spends a week alone, and then another. He does odd jobs to make money for food and a room to sleep in. He’s forgotten how different something like finding work had been, in the days before resumes and networking and the necessary google of someone’s name and background. People look at his eyes and assume he’s a vet, they look at his arms and assume that he can lift and carry things; they’re right on both counts, and that’s enough.

He already took the chance, just coming back here, but he worries about what he might do to Peggy’s future - her amazing, groundbreaking future - if he tries to slip back into her life. But he is also so tired, so encompassingly tired. He has helped to hold the world up for what feels a lifetime: Atlas with arms exhausted and shaking. He imagines how sweet it will feel to rest with her beside him. He knows he has to try.

(He must have known it all along. He brought himself to Washington D.C. in 1949. Peggy’s lived here for just over two years.)

He knows her address. He can remember the exact pattern of the heart monitor, the precise places where she laughed as she told him about the K Street apartment that had first been rented for her.

“Ghastly place,” she had said, smiling even as she did. “Everything dark wood, with barely a window for a bit of sunlight. And practically on top of scandal: I couldn’t go out my front door without thinking of Teapot Dome! So I had the housing stipend rerouted to a lovely little place on 11th Street and things worked out rather nicely. I didn’t feel quite so miserable about coming home, and there was a grocery and a café right across the street.”

He waits for her in the café, tucked in the back. Peggy comes in promptly at seven in the morning. She speaks to the woman behind the counter, a young black woman with a wide, sweet smile, and carries a cup of tea over while her breakfast is being prepared in the kitchen. She sits down at one of the tables entirely automatically, picking up a newspaper and not even looking as she slides into the booth seat facing toward the door. Her regular spot, then.

(Nat always said he made a terrible spy, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t be observant.)

He means to come sit on the seat opposite from her. He pictures it minutely, down to the way the vinyl will rub and give as he slides across, but he finds that he cannot picture how she will look at him, what she will say. In the moment, he freezes. He ends up looming awkwardly over her for long enough that she looks up at him, a polite smile on her face as if she expects to be handed a plate of bacon and eggs, or perhaps to need to turn down a request for a date.

But then she takes in what she’s seeing.

She breathes in a sob. Her teacup is already sitting on the tabletop, but she sets down her folded paper as carefully as if it were made of porcelain too.

“Steve?” He feels the echo of the fragile word through decades. He thought he knew, when he saw her for the first time barely able to lift her head from her hospital bed, when he found the photograph that she kept so boldly on her SHIELD desk twenty-five years after he'd been gone, that they would be like this in any time. Apparently he didn’t truly know until he hears it. He is shaking.

She stands abruptly, pushing herself out of the booth and catching his hands in hers. She is so very close to him.

“Am I going to have to murder Howard for keeping secrets?” she asks quietly. He shakes his head. She traces over the skin of his forehead, no longer as smooth as it had been. She runs fingers through the front curve of his hair, strange to her, with such perfect delicacy that he almost flinches away.

“No,” she agrees quietly, and takes her handbag from the table. “Come with me. I have to set a terrible example for my employees.”

* * *

Later, after Peggy calls in pretending to be sick to a Howard simultaneously suspicious (when was the last time Peggy was ill?) and totally heedless, probably already thinking of what kinds of explosions he’s going to be taking on today, she makes them fresh tea. He can tell that it’s just a distraction. The kettle is whistling for nearly a minute before she breaks their gaze and goes to pour the water.

When they are across from each other at her small kitchen table, she says, “Tell me,” and he does, a bit.

When he has finished his brief sketch of things, she takes a sip of tea. “So, the future,” she says, her voice musing rather than judging.

“You seem to be taking this pretty well,” he tells her.

“Yes, well, I’m not entirely sure that this is real, you see,” she explains.

He looks out her nice little window for a moment; when he leaves, he’ll have no memory of the kind of view she has. “If I’d showed up and said that I’d been dug out of the ice and came to find you, would you have believed it more?”

“Perhaps,” she admits. She looks into his eyes, though, and adds quietly, “But perhaps not.”

“I understand. Even where I’ve been, time travel is a pretty new development.” He pushes back from the table, carefully so as not to rattle Peggy’s pretty blue-edged china. He looks down at her, and she looks back, a bit of tilting evaluation in her eyes. “The Dodgers are going to lose the Series to the Yankees, four games to one. It’ll all be over Sunday night. The score of the last game will be ten to six.”

She swallows. “Then I suppose I shall see you Monday morning?” Her hands, with their neatly manicured nails, rest solidly on the table in front of her. Her knuckles are pressed tightly together.

“I’ll see you on Monday,” he says, nodding slightly to her, and sees himself out.

* * *

She is already waiting when he enters the café on Monday morning. The only clue to how she’s feeling is the way her head pops quickly up whenever the door swings open.

“I’m sorry about your Dodgers,” she says as he sits down across from her.

He shakes his head. “The Yanks will do even worse to the Phillies next year,” he says, and she covers her mouth with a trembling hand.

When she speaks again, it is aching. “Let’s go home,” she says.

“Don’t you have work?”

“I planned ahead this time. As far as anyone knows, I’m scheduled to be out of the office in meetings all day.” She examines him again. He understands the urge; he thinks at this point he could describe where each of her curls lies against her shoulders, and if he couldn’t, he’ll just need to take her in a while longer.

“Are you sure?” he asks.

“Of course I am.” Humor, just the most hidden hint of tears. “It seems that you’re still a bit hopeless, I see, even after all this time.”

(Tony would have said the same thing. Tony.)

“Probably.” He gets to his feet, offers her his hand. She takes it, lightly, more formality than anything else, and stands beside him. “I’ll work on it.”

“I’m sure you will.” She leads him out again, toward her apartment. “And I’ll certainly be happy to assist.”

* * *

They settle into something. It’s so easy that Steve catches his breath from it sometimes, exultation with a bold edge of fear. She goes to work, and he stays in their neighborhood. He does the shopping at the corner market and learns, after a fashion and several borrowed library books, how to cook. He does the laundry, and learns the hard way which of Peggy's suits need special care. He walks around getting to know the area.

He overhears two of Peggy’s neighbors whispering about him as he helps a little boy fix his bike chain on the street corner.

“I always thought she must have a man somewhere,” one says to the other.

“Well, he’s lucky she took him back. She’s been here two years, nice, polite girl with a good job and that wonderful smile, and he turns up now? Where has he been?”

“I’m not much sure it matters, looking at him.”

Steve tucks his head and grins.

He stops by the newsstand for a paper enough times that the owner, an older guy named Al, eventually asks if he’d like to do a bit of work. Steve knows it’s mostly pity, but he’s restless. He takes Al up on it, working pasted together hours so Al can take breaks during the day and get home a bit earlier in the evenings. He hangs around and chats other times. They talk baseball (Al’s a Chicago transplant, a heart and soul Cubs fan) and world events and dabble a bit into politics (Steve has to read the papers closely to try to keep his stories straight). Al had a son who never came home from Guadalcanal, and maybe that’s why, when he sees Steve sketching between customers, he asks him to fix up the sign above the stand, just a little refresh on the paint and maybe a nice little drawing.

Steve guesses that he does a good enough job, because the owner of the cafe and the drugstore ask for him to come over to their places, to do bigger murals inside. He starts to get asked to do all sorts of things, from house painting to pretty watercolor cards. He’s still home in time to make supper and talk to Peggy every evening.

He knows, now, that Peggy has a thick quilted dressing gown that looks like something a grandmother would wear, and doesn’t make him feel like a grandmother’s wearing it at all. He knows how she takes her tea and that she likes a square or two of chocolate at the end of the day. He knows how it feels for her to rest her feet in his lap as they read on lazy Saturday afternoons, and what it’s like to walk arm in arm back home talking about the film they’ve seen on a Sunday. He knows the giddiness of automatically calling her “sweetheart” as he asks her to pass the salt. He knows what she looks like when she first gets up, and the careful, precise order in which she applies her makeup and styles her hair. He knows what it’s like to kiss her on waking and as she leaves for work, as she arrives back home and before they go to bed. He knows what it is to fall asleep beside her, smiling.

He wakes himself up, shuddering, at least three times a week. Sometimes he is gasping. Sometimes he is crying. Most times he wakes Peggy too.

Early one Saturday morning, she switches on the light as he tries to calm himself. She rubs his arm for a moment before standing from the bed and putting on her dressing gown. He can hear the sound of her preparing tea in the kitchen, but when she doesn’t come back, he follows her.

“Sit,” she tells him, gesturing to the chair across from her at the table, and when he does, “Drink,” her voice firm and compassionate. He listens to her, taking a sip and then staring into the depths of his cup. She’s put in just the right amount of sugar.

After a moment, she says, “I haven’t asked you very much about where you’ve come from, but I think we both know how untenable that is. You need to talk. I’d like to hear it.”

He takes another sip, then a third. Finally, he says hoarsely, “I don’t know if I can tell you. I’ve already changed your life just by coming here. I don’t know how much I can do without ruining things.”

“Steve.” She leans across the table, touches his arm, his face. Her disheveled hair falls forward a little, framing the warmth of her eyes. “You are the best man I have ever known, and perhaps the strongest. And I don’t think you need to go through this alone. Let me help you.”

He almost laughs. How many times did he say something like that to people grieving a disaster that won’t happen for decades? How many times did he ignore his own advice? He thinks, again, of Sam. “Some stuff you leave there, other stuff you bring back. It's our job to figure out how to carry it.”

He thinks that Sam also meant that sometimes you find someone to carry it with you.

They don’t get out of their pajamas until well into the afternoon. Once Steve starts talking, he finds that he can’t stop. He tells her about Hydra (“Get up with bloody fleas, I told them”) and about Bucky. He tells her about Korea and McCarthy and Vietnam and the civil rights movement, about Betty Friedan and President Kennedy and President Nixon, about AIDS and global warming. He was in the twenty-first century for over a decade. He reads fast and doesn’t sleep much, and his memory is excellent.

He tells her about the snap. He tells her about his friends.

Finally, with darkness outside their windows, he says to her, “I keep thinking about Maya Lin. She’ll be an architect and a designer. She becomes famous for making the memorial for the war in Vietnam. I know it’s right to do what we can to avoid that war, to minimize that damage. Making that choice could be wrong for Maya Lin. It will change her life. How do we know which strings we can pull without letting everything fall apart?”

Peggy looks down at the notes she has started taking. She flips over one page, then another. “Well, we shall think and strategize and try our best to do the best for the most people.” She taps a finger on one paragraph. “I think that this is one string we should start tying up as quickly as we can.”

"If I see a situation pointed south, I can't ignore it," he told Tony once, and that was true. It still is. It's just harder when south isn't a clear direction on the compass, when trying to fix things could only make things worse. This is why Steve could tell her, why he had to. Because he believes in her mind, in her ruthlessness and her clearheadedness, but in her goodness too. He doesn't think he could have done any of this alone.

(He must have known he would do this all along. He brought himself to Washington D.C. in 1949. Zola was brought here just over two months ago.)

* * *

They tell Howard. Partly because they need him, to provide documentation for Steve, for resources, for cover. Partly because Peggy says that he’s a friend and he’s trustworthy, and Steve trusts Peggy. For his own part, though, Steve needs to work to remember how much hasn’t happened with Howard. He hasn’t become who he’ll become yet.

* * *

Steve sleeps better knowing that they’re doing something. He doesn’t sleep _well_ until they have Bucky back.

“Any idea what he’ll be like after rise and shine?” asks Howard, checking once again the pulse of the man lying unconscious on one of his many guest beds. To everyone else, Bucky’s hair is long, unkempt. For Steve, it’s shorter than he’s used to now. The arm, high tech for this time, looks especially ugly and primitive.

Steve thinks back to all the information they gained after the fall of the Triskelion. Nazi records have always been blessed and cursed. “He hasn’t been under for too long. It won’t be pretty at first, but we’ll be able to get him back.”

In bed that night, Peggy holds his hand beneath the blanket and whispers, “Hopefully we’ll get him back back without you trying to sacrifice yourself,” and he doesn’t know whether she’s talking about Azzano or the helicarrier, and he likes that she has the option for either.

* * *

They count on the minimization of Hydra’s influence to help stabilize things, and they’ll prove to be right. Peggy also cultivates herself a reputation for sound, nearly prescient, advice to other agencies. It will help them influence things they need to in the future, but it’s already believable, based on a solid foundation. No one suspects the man who’s occasionally seen on her arm at functions or visiting her office - bearded, older, bearing only a passing resemblance to the lost Captain America - of having anything to do with it. He barely talks shop with the guys, usually ends up recommending recipes to the wives.

“I do prefer you in an apron and pearls,” Peggy says as Steve rubs her feet after one such night out, her heels discarded beneath the kitchen table.

“It’s the natural order of things,” Steve tells her solemnly.

“Too right, pal,” Bucky calls from the bathroom. (He heard from Al at the newsstand that they were having trouble with their sink and came over to help rather than let Steve take care of it. “Flood the whole place, more like.”)

* * *

Neither of them quite knows who proposed to whom. Steve claims he did it, Peggy attests with equal vehemence that she took the initiative. Neither of them much cares when it comes down to it.

They invite the Commandos to the wedding. Or, rather, Peggy invites them, and then when they all show up with faltering, incomplete smiles, Steve comes over to say hello. 

“If it was anyone else but the two of you, I don’t know that I could believe it,” Monty says, dazed.

Dugan wants horse racing tips. Morita wants to know if he ever makes it with Ava Gardner. “Already tried asking that one, pal,” says Howard sourly.

“Sometimes you just have to live it,” says Steve, and goes to take another turn on the floor with his wife.

* * *

They move to Jersey in ‘52. Steve’s afraid that Bucky’s going to have an aneurysm over the betrayal, but the commute’s easier on Peggy now that SHIELD’s working out of Camp Lehigh most of the time.

(Buck ends up living in Brooklyn near his folks and goes back to school to get his engineering degree. Howard says he doesn’t care, he knew how much schooling Bucky had when he offered him the job, but Bucky wants to earn it, and he likes to learn.)

Somehow, it takes three days to pack up the apartment in DC and three weeks to unpack in their cozy little house in New Jersey. Peggy’s pulling late nights all the time as she gets things put together, but she refuses to let Steve do much during the day: they both have extremely strong opinions about every little thing, and she wants to be there to decide which cupboard the glasses will go in, or how far the sofa will be placed from the window and how far the armchair from the sofa.

They finally get things sorted one Saturday when it’s nearly autumn. They leave the door open to let in the air, still warm with just the beginnings of a chill. Peggy stands with her hands on her hips in the middle of their living room. Steve watches from the doorway, loving the way the light filters over her hair, loving the way he already knows exactly how it will.

He steps into the room with her, selects a record and sets the needle carefully. He holds out a hand to her.

They’re practiced at this now. They’ve been to the Stork Club and danced at their wedding and done a thousand other things in between. Peggy jokes that Steve only breaks her foot once a month now, twice if she’s very lucky. But there’s no showing off today. He holds her in his arms and they sway, turning in slow circles, the music washing over them as they stand in their new home. 

“The war's over, Steve. We can go home. Imagine it,” she had once said to him in a vision that had taken his breath, a vision that might never exist. 

He doesn’t have to imagine it anymore.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If Markus/McFeely and the Russos can have entirely different understandings of their whack time travel notions, I can do whatever the hell I want with it. (To be clear, I'm siding with the Russos and their delightfully chaotic multiverse/alternate timeline.)
> 
> There might be another chapter to this but my relationship to fic these days is so extremely fraught that it's all entirely "who knows?????"


	2. 1981

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, I might be doing this? We'll see.
> 
> I've basically spent the last week spinning out a whole new alternate universe life for Steve and Peggy just for funsies, so I think what I'll be doing is adding in moments and oneshots from that whenever I have the urge. I probably will keep posting other, separate stories for this ship, but this is a good balance between my laziness/writer's block/lack of discipline, and wanting to tell a cool story over a longer period of time.
> 
> The chapters won't be sequential (you'll see with this one) but they will all be part of the same universe: there will be the same kids in all the stories where they already have kids, and pieces that take place later in the timeline will reference things that take place earlier even if they haven't been posted yet (I'll try to keep it minimally confusing, don't worry). Some will be more Steggy focused, some more life in general focused (see below). All that is to say that you might not get everything just as you read it, but it's all part of the plan. (I say that like I'm a masterful strategist. I'm not. I just have a google doc full of notes, and a dream.)

“Dad?”

Steve’s head comes up at once, and he is half standing before he realizes it. The voice is intimately familiar, but he can’t remember the last time he heard it here.

“Is something wrong?” he asks Nate as calmly as he can, hands clenching, braced. The only reason he can imagine his son being here is that something is wrong with someone in their family, and his mind immediately starts listing the possibilities. World events he can handle (he _has_ handled), but the idea of Peggy or one of the girls injured, of Nate in some kind of trouble, has him pushing away tendrils of panic.

He sometimes longs for the days when his children were younger, but he certainly doesn’t miss the constant underlying worry about every spiked temperature and street crossed without looking both ways.

But Nate is already assuring him. “Everything’s fine, Dad.” He smiles, or does something like it, as if in proof.

“Okay.” Steve chooses to accept it. He settles back at his desk and gestures for Nate to come in. He does, swinging off his backpack and closing the door of the small room before moving to sit at the desk across from Steve.

He says nothing for a long moment, distracting himself instead by staring at the array of little toys that Steve keeps on the edge of his desk: a Rubik’s cube, an Etch-a-sketch, some small figurines of popular cartoon characters.

Finally Steve asks, “Did I forget some kind of bring your kid to work day?”

Nate laughs. “No, it’s not that.”

“So what is it?”

“You know how I’m taking that seminar? The Psychology of War?”

“Sure,” Steve says with a puzzled shrug. Nate had registered for classes during winter break at home. They’d talked over dinner about which he was most looking forward to, and about the fact that he needed one more upper level course to complete his BA in Psychology. This one had fit best into his schedule and would give him some good exposure if he decided to work with vets, despite his minimal interest in the particular subject matter. (Steve hadn’t mentioned his concern that it might be too much for Nate, who’s always been their sensitive one.)

“We’re supposed to be talking next week about drafts as opposed to a volunteer army. You know, does it feel different if you have to go to war instead of deciding for yourself that it’s right. And I was in the library just now, doing the reading and…” He unzips his bag to take out a xeroxed packet of primary sources and hands it over. Steve gives him a questioning look, even though he has a gut-level suspicion of what this is about, and flips past letters by Civil War hired substitutes, First World War propaganda, and Herbert Asquith’s ‘The Volunteer,’ until he sees two photos of himself staring up from the paper. Below the images is the transcript of a recruitment ad he had recorded while on his USO tour of Europe (“Here in the trenches with my fellow fighting men, I am even more sure that our cause is just. Uncle Sam wants you...and so do I! Get down to your local recruiting station, and join the fight today!”).

Peggy would pretend cluelessness, force Nate to come out with it (“Did you need help with the reading, Nathaniel?”), or at least advise circumspection. Steve just sighs.

“That was written by some OWI guy. Your teacher shouldn’t be including it as a psychological statement of anything.”

“Well,” Nate responds automatically, as if they’re just back having a debate around their kitchen table, “it does speak to the way volunteering for the army was idealized, and it’s even more impactful coming from Captain America, the quintessential volunteer.” He stops himself, looking bewildered. Steve can’t tell whether it’s from the absurdity of this conversation, or because between his sisters and his parents, he rarely gets to complete an argument.

Steve looks back down at the papers again. “How did they get these pictures?” he asks, half to himself. One is of him before the serum, part of the pre-experimental barrage of photos they’d shot. (Luckily he has his shirt on in this particular one; there had been a lot more clinical ones taken at the time.) The other is a candid of him talking with some brass a week or two after the liberation of Rome, probably snapped by some Army photog. He’s in standard uniform for once instead of the stars-and-stripes getup. He and the Commandos had been chasing down some info on Hydra cells which had been looking to hide out in Italy until it was safer. (They hadn’t tracked them down until Peggy had cabled with a crucial piece of information which had been nearly overlooked in an interrogation file.) Neither photo looks particularly like him since he came back.

Nate says, “They started declassifying a lot of the World War II files in the last year or so. But Dad— Dad, that’s really _you_ , isn’t it? I mean, Nana Barnes had those old albums of Uncle Bucky with you looking like this guy.” He points to the before picture of Steve. “And that’s _Steve Rogers_.”

It strikes Steve that this is the first time he’s heard any of his children say his real name. They’ve all asked at one time or another why Peggy or Bucky or Howard called him Steve when his name was meant to be Grant Carter, but they’ve all been satisfied with the bland answer, “Old nickname.” There was no reason for them to think otherwise. None of them has ever put things together like this.

“Yes,” he tells his son. “I am Steve Rogers. For a few years there, I was Captain America.”

Nate splays backward. Steve remembers suddenly all the comics Nate had read and drawn as a child. Captain America was fading and minor by that point, needed less as either a symbol or a counternarrative in the reality that he and Peggy had helped shape, but still part of Nate’s pantheon. “And then you just...stopped? You were a _superhero_ and then you stopped being one.”

Carefully, Steve says, “There were circumstances that I can’t tell you about, but that’s mostly right.”

Nate looks like he wants to get up and pace, but Steve’s office is so small. He takes one of Steve’s little figurines instead, a little Elroy Jetson on a scooter, and fiddles with it. It’s strange to watch him do that: Nate who has always been patience and stillness, equilibrious, listening.

“You always—” he starts, spinning the scooter wheels almost absently. “I thought— Dad, how could you _stop_? I’ve listened to you tell all of us that we needed to stand up, even when it was hard. Since that first day you and Mom found us, I’ve watched you help old people across the street and make soup for sick neighbors and go ten rounds with teachers who you didn’t think were doing their jobs right. If you could do more than that, if you could stand up as Steve Rogers, why wouldn’t you?”

Steve can’t say that he has stood up in more ways than Nate will ever know, can’t tell him about the “little trips” Peggy has sent him on over the years when no one else would do, and there was a time when that would have grated against him. But he’s lived with his choice for longer than Nate has been alive. He doesn’t feel that inhabiting exhaustion anymore that had made coming back seem like the only way to go on. But he doesn’t have to convince himself that it was alright anymore, either, doesn’t have to comfort himself with excuses he felt he could see right through. He knows the wrong of what he did, and the overwhelming _right_.

He gestures around himself. “They say that if you save a life, you’ve saved a whole world. It might not have involved punching anyone or blowing anything up, but I’ve saved a lot of worlds here. I’ve helped raise four kids who are changing everything. You think I stopped? I just chose to do something different.”

Nate is the child who Steve has had to learn the most carefully. The others are bolder, easier to read. Nate’s silence now is a considering one, a type of absorption. Steve waits. He thinks, as he does, of all the amazing things that Nate is going to do as he grows. He doesn't know the details in the same way he knows some things, but he  _knows_ it, somewhere deep and satisfied.

Finally, Nate asks, “Mom must know, right?” and Steve laughs. After a beat, Nate laughs too. They both know Peggy Carter too well. And Steve’s heart fills as he thinks that Nate only knows the two of them the way they are now: trusting and trusted between the two of them, a team. Partners in a way that would have, in another future, been impossible.

“Do your sisters know about these?” Steve asks, gesturing toward the pictures, and Nate responds immediately, “What do you think?”

He’s right. If any of the other Carter children had seen them, Steve would surely have heard (and then never heard the end of it), but the girls are busy: Rose just about done with law school as Drea finishes her first year, Emma without a moment to spare as she struggles to get her business off the ground. They aren’t taking the time to look at historic photographs that they don’t even realize are related to their lives. In thirty years, this would be the sort of thing that would scroll across a newsfeed (“Captain America archives declassified”) and into everyone’s brains for an afternoon, but right now it is the sort of thing that appears at the bottom of a column on page A12.

“I’ll tell them,” he decides. A Steve Rogers decision, Bucky would call it, shaking his head. Not there until suddenly it is, and now he’s full steam ahead _sure_ about it.

Nate raises an eyebrow. “When?” Hard to tell whether he’s asking because he wants to avoid the occasion, or because he wants to make sure he has popcorn.

“I’ll talk it over with your mom, but we’re all supposed to go to New York in May for Rosie’s graduation. I’ll make a dinner reservation.”

“Don’t pretend that just because we’re in a public place they won’t make a scene,” Nate warns, too familiar with his older sisters.

“At least part of it will be silent,” Steve signs hopefully. Nate shakes his head.

“Em is going to murder you with her disappointment,” he signs back, “and only stop because it wouldn’t be fair if Rosie and Drea didn’t get a turn to bring the heat.”

Steve sighs. “Well,” he says, “that’s part of how I raised you.”

“And you wouldn’t change it?” Nate asks, not as urgent anymore, more factual, curious. “You don’t have any regrets?”

There’s a knock on Steve’s door: his next meeting. “I made choices,” he tells Nate, deliberate, taking his time. “And of course I regret some of them. I’m human. We don’t always do everything right. But the choices I made got me this life. How could I change that? How could I regret it?”

Nate tilts his head, nodding as if perhaps he finally understands. In five years, he will hold his first child in his arms and tell his father that now he truly does.


	3. 1950

Peggy is a busy woman. She loves her job, knows how important it is and takes that responsibility seriously, understands how overwhelmingly successful she has to come off considering her role and her gender. However, she loves Steve Rogers too, and is not unmindful of the absolutely miraculous circumstances which have brought them back together. So when he suggests a regular date night, she can’t refuse him. She has her secretary put it in her official work diary that she is to leave the office no later than 5 PM on such evenings, and when some emergency comes up and she can’t avoid missing the appointed time, she reschedules promptly.

And Steve is clearly doing his level best to make it worth her while. He isn’t overly familiar with Washington D.C., doesn’t know the hole-in-the-wall family restaurants or quietly original little spots the way he would back in Brooklyn, and so she often finds him perusing travel guides or the newspaper for ideas about where to take her.

He starts simply, though, with just a picture show, a good idea in the heat of the summertime. It’s the new feature _Sunset Boulevard_ , which Peggy has been anticipating seeing; she’s heard plenty of people buzzing about it. She knows that she should be riveted by the atmosphere and the characters, by Miss Swanson’s performance, but she finds herself distracted.

She’s held hands with Steve before, of course she has, she’s done much more than that with Steve. But there’s something about sitting in the dark theater that makes it different. She feels it more, notices all the little bits of it. She stares ahead at the film and sees nothing, overwhelmed by the smooth skin of his palm, the feeling of his fingers interlocking with hers, the way he sometimes runs his thumb absently over the back of her hand.

She chances a look over at him, disguised as a rearrangement of her hair. He appears captivated by the action on the screen. He doesn’t seem to so much as notice that she can’t focus on anything but him.

He had let her choose the seats while he purchased refreshments. For some reason she had gravitated to the back row rather than her usual preferred spot toward the middle of the theater. Now she knows why. She must already have been anticipating this.

She lifts their clasped hands, places a small kiss on the back of his, just on the middle knuckle. Then another, and a third, pressing her lips down toward his wrist. Gentle, focused kisses, silent and unnoticed except by the two of them.

When he turns to her, Steve looks startled, even in profile. She can see him clearly enough in the flickering light of the screen. “What are you doing?” he whispers, leaning close to her.

“I should have thought that would be obvious,” she whispers back, taking advantage of his proximity to touch his throat with her fingers, then with her mouth.

He shivers, a full body movement, and quickly stills himself into a nearly unnatural quiet. She imagines it as if he is on a diving board, preparing to spring, and readies herself for the heated motion of his mouth against hers. The anticipation of it shimmers within her. She waits for him. But he subsides again, turns himself back toward the screen.

“Maybe not here,” he says out of the corner of his mouth, voice low. He loosens his hand from hers and slides his arm around her shoulder instead.

She could goad him into it, heated words that would get into his blood. Instead she stays still under his arm, more puzzled than angry, more confused than hurt. She misses even the feeling of holding his hand. She spends the rest of the film staring ahead and wishing she hadn’t done anything. She won’t actually enjoy _Sunset Boulevard_ until several decades later.

* * *

She doesn’t remember Steve as a particularly good driver - of cars, at least; he’d managed well enough on the motorcycle, until such time as he decided it was more prudent to blow it up or throw it at an enemy combatant - but he insists on surprising her with the location of their next date.

“You could simply direct me,” Peggy says tetchily from beside him, hands folded over the handbag in her lap. Steve laughs.

“You’d put it all together. At least this way I get to do some kind of reveal.”

He does tell her that the drive will take about an hour, which is a mistake on his part as she begins calculating what could be within an hour radius from them. She doesn’t come up with any particularly likely options, though, so she settles in to watch him.

What she notes most generally is a look of confidence about him: he drives with just the one hand on the wheel and glances over at her for long moments, as if trusting that the road will remain straight enough for it not to matter. But every so often he will seem to check himself, placing his other hand on the wheel and straightening himself up in the seat as he focuses through the windscreen. She imagines that at this point he’s used to driving vehicles a bit more advanced than this one. He might have reassured her (and Howard, and Bucky when they’d asked) that there were no flying cars in the future, but she has the feeling that they’ll have developed more updated transportation than her Studebaker.

His hands, she notices, are beautiful on the wheel, solid and confident. She remembers him in the dark of their bedroom last night, the gentle rub of those fingers along her skin, and has to suppress a shivering breath. She slides closer to him, concentrating on smoothing her skirt as he glances over at him.

“How am I to know if I’m even dressed correctly for this outing?” she asks, keeping her voice entirely light, with just a joking hint of a pout. She subtly adjusts her blue checked summer dress over her décolletage and only looks up when he jerks the car straight again on the road.

“You’re dressed perfectly,” he says hoarsely.

She rests a hand on his upper thigh in concern and gives him a bit of a comforting back and forth stroke. “Are you certain you’re feeling all right?”

“Yes.” He clears his throat. “I’m fine.” They make one last turn and then he says, with what she disappointingly identifies as relief, “We’re here.”

‘Here’ doesn’t seem to be much of anywhere, but she sighs and gamely gets out of the car and walks through the field where rows of others have parked.

“I read that they just started up last year,” Steve tells her as he hands over a pair of quarters for each of them and leads her into the county fairgrounds. “So it’s not too big just yet.”

He isn’t wrong - the majority of the space seems to be taken up with livestock shows that neither of them have particular interest in, and the limited selection of rides and games is a bit shabby and homemade - but she enjoys walking along the midway together. Steve won’t allow himself to be convinced into entering the pie eating contest, but he does eat several more hamburgers than seems sensible.

“I hope your stomach is as strong as it is expansive,” she teases as they wait in line for the small carousel with its tinkling music. Steve pats his middle beneath his red and white striped shirt.

“No need to worry about me.”

 _Oh yes there is,_ she thinks to herself as she remembers the way his abdominal muscles will shock inward as her breath hits them, as she trickles a finger down his torso. She has to shake herself to remember that she is actually sitting on a plaster horse beside Steve, both of them surrounded by children. _You’re a menace, Steven Rogers._

They save the shooting gallery for last, selecting places next to each other.

“I’d like the dog,” Steve tells her. “If we’re picking prizes.”

She promises, “Then you shall have it,” and moments later he has his trophy in hand. Not the small stuffed animal he had pointed out - they had taken pity on the boy who had come in third place to Peggy’s first and allowed him to take his pick - but a tin airplane that they both look at with some irony.

“Is it strange that I’m more impressed that you can do this than I am that you can shoot a dime in the air at fifty paces?” Steve asks.

Peggy laughs. “I think you’re perhaps confusing me with Annie Oakley. My skills aren’t quite that sharp, and are generally put to less entertaining use.” She comes behind him, giving over another nickel when the man overseeing the booth glares at them for not vacating the place now that their game has finished. She adjusts Steve’s aim, sighting down to the target.

“These guns are always made with a bit of a defect,” she says, leaning near to him. “They don’t shoot straight. You simply have to make a test shot and gauge how far off they’ve designed them, then adjust accordingly.”

Steve’s next shot gets much closer to the bullseye, although that wasn’t a particular accomplishment based on his previous round. Nevertheless, she squeezes his shoulder, and says softly in his ear, “Excellent work, my love.” He turns toward her, the gun largely forgotten. Their faces are very close. She can practically measure his eyelashes, or match his eye color to an artist’s palette. She begins to count his freckles...

It wasn’t a plan this time, or anything near, but somehow she finds herself pressing him against the far wall of one of the tents. She thinks this one might have had the flower show inside, but her mind is too preoccupied by Steve’s mouth on hers, by the way her fingers have anchored themselves in his hair, by his hands’ daring exploration of her back. When they encounter the strap of her dress, however, he pulls away.

“Um.” He rubs the back of his reddened neck and takes a deep breath in. “Um, I think they’re closing things down.”

He’s right, which is the only reason she joins him in calmly walking back to the car. They don’t speak much on the drive back. Steve is concentrating very intensely on the road. As they approach the city, Peggy says, “You’ve forgotten your plane,” and Steve says, “Win me another next year?” with such hope in his voice that she finds herself forgiving him.

* * *

Peggy is a strategist, and her mind begins planning officially seducing Steve on a date before she’s consciously set herself to the task. When he takes her out to dinner, she twines her legs with his beneath the table; he loses his train of thought sufficiently that she has to order for him, but recovers himself by eating his way through what seems like an inhuman quantity of the spaghetti she requested. At the newly opened drive-in, she settles against him, touches him entirely chastely but affectionately beneath their shared blanket, and pointedly does not mention the spacious backseat of her car. (He holds himself rigid the whole time, and gives monosyllabic answers to all of her questions about the film on the way home, but doesn’t give her more than a chaste peck until they’re back in the apartment.)

She thinks she has him the evening he takes her to the ice cream parlor. She typically requests a small dish of ice cream, maple walnut or sometimes chocolate, but tonight she looks up at Steve and asks if he would be alright sharing a banana split with her.

“I’m having a bit of a craving,” she says blithely as they move toward the counter. “But I certainly couldn’t finish it on my own.”

The table is small, and they both have to lean over it to share the large sundae. Peggy takes small, considering spoonfuls of ice cream, her face quite close to his as she carefully licks her way through her portion. She is very attentive as he begins to tell her about a very early request he’s received for hand-drawn Christmas cards, asking thoughtful questions about the designs and his scheduling in order to have the quantity ready in time. Strangely, it is he who seems distracted, however, stumbling over his answers and barely able to complete a thought.

“Steve? Are you alright?” she asks him with concern, having thoroughly cleaned and finished - slowly - her second cherry. She twirls the stems between her fingers, this way and then that.

“Sure,” he grunts. “Just an ice cream headache.”

She cuts a section of one of the bananas with her spoon, nursing the whipped cream off the tip as she considers him earnestly. “I wouldn’t think that your enhanced metabolism would allow it.”

“Well, I guess we don’t know everything.” His voice is pitching lower now. “Maybe we should just head home. I think I need to...lie down.”

“But what about the ice cream?” she asks sensibly.

“I’ll buy you another one tomorrow.” He takes her hand and helps her up: disappointingly, the most he’ll touch her for twenty more minutes. (Although the next morning, she wouldn’t say that she’s unsatisfied.)

* * *

She mentions it to Barnes one night as he sits reading her newspaper and she makes her final preparations to meet Steve at the art museum, where she plans on making sure Steve pays special attention to the nudes. She has already decided to use the words “curve” and “flesh” at least twice each.

“Has he happened to mention to you why he only just seems to want to hold my hand in public?” she asks grimly as she applies her lipstick.

When Barnes smiles now, it looks nearly real, nearly - nearly - correct. He doesn’t get the memory confusion he had at the beginning. He does, however, still like to come around to their place fairly often; Peggy thinks the silence of being alone reminds him of things he’d rather not remember.

“He thinks he’s being smart,” Barnes tells her.

Peggy sighs. “Which usually means he’s being hopeless.”

Barnes shrugs. “Usually,” he agrees, and turns to the funny pages with the air of Steve and his hopelessness being significantly more her problem now.

* * *

One Friday afternoon, she finds herself at the bottom of a stack of paperwork with nothing else to replace it, and so for once she gives herself the rest of the day off. Simply strolling down the street feels luxurious at 3:30 on a workday, and she considers actually treating herself to a pastry or having a browse at the bookstore, but instead she finds herself taking the route home. Hopefully Steve won’t have started preparing anything just yet and they can have a meal out.

It seems she’s in luck: she spots Steve as she approaches their block, sitting on the steps at the corner and chatting with their neighbor Iris, eight months pregnant and knitting yet another tiny sweater.

“Good to see you, Peggy,” says Iris with a wave.

“Hi Peg,” Steve says smiling up at her. He has clearly been enjoying what might be the last of the fine weather for the year; his face is a bit flushed. He has his legs stretched down the steps in front of him. He might not be the boy she lost to the ice and he never will be again, but he is something new instead, something deeply familiar and still open for her endless exploration.

Peggy smiles back at the two of them and nearly goes to sit down herself, but then Iris yawns and starts wrapping up her yarn, clearly ready for a nap. Steve helps her stand up (everyone in the neighborhood has been quietly speculating about twins based on how unwieldy she is) and they wish Iris a good afternoon before they continue up the block.

“Not that I’m complaining, but how’d you get away so early?” Steve asks, draping an arm around her waist as they walk.

“Well, I’m in charge, you see. So I simply stopped in the middle of a meeting and said, ‘I must get home, I’m absolutely _desperate_ for some meatloaf with my man.’”

“You wouldn’t do that,” Steve says as they climb their front steps. “Not for meatloaf.” He waits patiently behind her as she digs out her keys and goes to open the door.

Peggy sniffs as she twists the knob. “You have no idea what I would or wouldn’t do for meatloaf,” and Steve twirls her into his arms in the foyer and says, “Since I’m usually the one providing it for you, I think I have a pretty good idea,” before he bends to kiss her, slow and warm and in front of the still-open door facing their entire street.

She is quiet as they climb the stairs, but she thinks Steve has mistaken it for a satisfied sort of quiet. He hums very softly as they reach their floor, and has changed his shirt and combed his hair before he realizes that she hasn’t moved from the living room.

He starts cautiously, “I thought we were—”

“Why is it,” she asks, “that you don’t mind touching me here, in front of any of our neighbors who might walk by, but when we’re on one of your outings, the idea of any part of my body besides my fingers seems entirely impossible for you to grasp?”

“What?” He blinks, but she recognizes it as more nervous than confused.

“Don’t,” she says dangerously, and he deflates.

“Oh.” He drops down to sit on the sofa. “Huh. I guess I hoped that you wouldn’t notice...that.”

“I’ve noticed, Steven.”

He looks pained, whether at being found out or because of the icy blast of her tone, she isn’t sure. “I just thought that it was more better this way.”

“Better for whom?”

“Well,” he says, a bit of courage to the sticking place in his tone, “for both of us.”

She puts her hands on her hips and asks, “Why would you think that, when I have clearly been signaling otherwise on my own part? We live together, Steve, and I’m certain you remember what we do in the privacy of our own home even if you pretend otherwise. Why would you think that this type of behavior when we’re out together was something I wanted?”

“Fine.” He stands. “Maybe it was for me. Maybe now that I have this life, our amazing life we’re starting together, I want to slow things down, just a little bit. I’ve lived everything out of order and for once I want to do something normal, I want to take you out and have it just be about the date because we didn’t get a chance for that part. I want to take the time we never had.” He closes his eyes, looking lost in the middle of their sitting room. “I’m sorry if it was selfish. I just—For once I wanted to do things right.”

“Oh, Steve.” She sits on the sofa herself and sighs so deeply that her shoulders rise halfway to her ears before dropping. Steve must sense the de-escalating tension, because he sits down cautiously beside her. Gently she says, “I wonder if perhaps you’ve forgotten how very much good has happened to us out of order. For us, that _is_ right. I know it’s not...traditional, but so little about us is, and that’s something that I love.”

“I usually love it too.” He waves a hand a bit helplessly. “But I thought maybe this once we could mix things up, do them in the order most people do.”

“Well, we aren’t most people, but I think I would be willing to compromise.”

“What did you have in mind?”

She holds up one finger. “We continue with regularly scheduled date nights.” She adds a second. “You kiss me at least once on each one, publicly.” A third. “I won’t force you into exhibitionism.”

He looks at her for a long moment, at the fingers she still has extended into the air. He gently unfolds a fourth one. “I’ll tell you if I don’t mind a little exhibitionism for once.”

* * *

He surprises her the next time by choosing to take her bowling. He kisses her once for every strike and twice, in consolation, for every split. When she wins, he dips her so deeply that she hears whistles from the adjoining lanes.

“You do earn marks for enthusiasm,” she tells him once they’ve come up for air. “But I think it will be a good while before you catch up to me in terms of creativity. You’re still a work in progress.”

“That’s okay,” he says. “We have plenty of time to work on it.” And he kisses her again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wanted to talk about the ways we nostalgize our past, both individual and collective, but also I was like "what if Steve wanted to take Peggy on normal dates and Be A Gentleman About It and she was frustratingly randy about the whole thing?" so here ya go.
> 
> 5/26/19: The absolutely tremendous Robot ([tumblr](https://roboticonography.tumblr.com)/[AO3](https://archiveofourown.org/users/roboticonography/works)) has made some lovely art for the last bit. Take a look [here](https://roboticonography.tumblr.com/post/185187720398/ive-fallen-madly-in-love-with)!!


	4. 1965

She comes home with a headache. It’s to be expected when one has been to three - no, four - time zones in just over forty-eight hours, but knowing the cause doesn’t make it go away.

The luggage that she takes from the back of the government car is the overnight case from the set that the Commandos had given to her and Steve for their wedding (“Better than that old kit bag!”). The blue and white leather is cracking by this point, but it’s too familiar for her to give up, and when would she have the time to pick out something new anyway? She could ask Steve to take care of it, she supposes, but would he know that she likes an elastic pocket not only in the lid but inside the body too, that she wants a removable lining for smuggling purposes when necessary?

(Well, he could probably guess that part.)

She walks up the path to the house so slowly that even the sound of the car has faded before she reaches the front porch. Her step is meandering rather than just tired, although the idea of a shower and the opportunity to fall asleep in her own bed is so pleasant that it is almost painful, like finally stretching a long-folded limb. She takes the time to notice the first of the crocuses coming up beside the steps, and how pretty the inset little stained glass window looks in the velvet night: the lamp had been on at the end of the drive, but this close there is just the faintest light from deep in the house beaming through. There are worn places in the front door varnish which she notices as she puts her key in the lock; Steve usually fixes it up once they’re deeper into spring.

Although she expected her husband to still be awake, she nevertheless feels a resignation when she sees him sitting, relaxed, on the living room sofa. She doesn’t think that she has the energy to talk, even with him.

She knows that he must have heard her footsteps in the hallway, likely even heard the car in the drive, but he doesn’t look up until she has slipped off her shoes and come to sit on the loveseat, staring blankly ahead of her toward the empty fireplace.

“Hi,” he says after a moment of waiting for her. He has his index finger tucked into a page midway through the book he was reading, as if he’s only anticipating a brief interruption. It’s a children’s book, _A Wrinkle in Time_ according to the cover. Peggy thinks he must have started reading it to everyone at bedtime. “How was the trip?”

She waves a vague hand. “Who can remember?”

“Well, hopefully someone.” He sets his book aside. “Or else all this international travel was sort of a waste.” She smiles, or something like it, but doesn’t respond. She knows that Steve is watching her, but she finds herself closing her eyes and listening to the quiet country sounds around their house. Steve is more at home in the city, but they had both agreed that they would like to raise their children out here. The crickets, the wind in the trees and the sound of far-off birds reminds her of her childhood, out of reach by decades which feel so much longer.

“Was everything alright here?” she asks after a moment. Steve pauses before responding; she knows that he can see the weight in her, the tiredness, but he must recognize that she needs some sort of normal anchor too, because he starts to speak. The children have nearly worn out another Beatles record, playing it over and over, and Steve’s about ready to break it himself. Drea still wants to adopt the cat they keep seeing in the yard. Nate wet the bed again - they’d thought they were done with that. Someone went to the museum with their class. Everyone is already looking forward to their time in Brooklyn over the summer; they’d talked about it at dinner that evening…

She doesn’t realize that she is crying until Steve has crouched in front of her and given her knee a gentle touch. Crying isn’t the word for it, really. She is weeping, without sobs, the tears silent and unceasing.

“Did something happen?” Steve asks, and she feels the years that have passed, because he sounds solid, none of the discomfort he would have once had seeing her like this.

“Something is always happening,” she says on a drawn-in breath. “There will always be something happening, and it will always be my responsibility to handle it.”

“Ours,” Steve says instantly. “I know that I’ve taken a backseat in things—” Self-sacrificing, as always. As if it had been only his choice, as if they hadn’t decided together back at the beginning that it would be safest, as if he had been in any state at the time to do the work that needed doing, as if she hadn’t been so certain that she could do it all on her own. “Nate starts first grade in the fall. We’ve been talking about me going back to school anyway once the kids are all out during the day. There’s no reason I can’t come back in an official capacity.”

Technically he’s right. Keeping all circumstances in mind, his body is over fifty now, but he still runs a three minute mile when he has a mind to. His fighting style is more elegant than it was during the war, honed, reliant on physics and improvisation, and adaptable to even an older physique. And more than that, she imagines him by her side in meetings, in her office, a true equal with whom to make decisions.

She shakes her head. “We decided. You’ve done your duty.”

“That was years ago. You’ve been doing this twice as long as I ever did.”

“If you came back, it would drain something from you, something that I’ve seen you earn back over all this time.”

Gently, he asks, “But what about what it’s draining from you?”

She shakes her head. “It can’t matter.”

“It matters more than anything,” he tells her, and anyone else would be unwilling to argue with the steel underlying the words. Peggy stands, so abruptly that he shifts himself back. She simply has to be moving, even without purpose.

“I don’t think I had realized there would be so much,” she says. Her footfalls are soundless, lost in the carpet. The idea of the drinks cart crosses her mind and is erased again in an instant, papered over by the words spilling from her. “I should have known, but I didn’t really...The map keeps shifting on me. There are so many little pieces of which I must always be aware, and still there are things we can’t anticipate.” His mouth tightens, and she can tell that he is fighting against looking away. She knows he is remembering what happened with Emmett Till.

He gets to his feet, slow and careful not for the sake of his own aging body, but because of her caged eyes. He walks to her and moves to touch the pulse of her wrists, sliding his thumbs with tenderness over the gasping beat that he finds there. He places her palms together and presses his lips to the tops of her gathered fingers. “These are the strongest hands I know,” he says steadily. “But even the strongest hands can’t do everything on their own. If it is too much, you leave. You know that.”

“And have everything fall apart?”

“You’ve trained some competent people,” Steve points out with a bit of humor. “Things won’t go to pieces right away.”

“I’ve trained competent people, yes,” she says, “but no one who knows things as we do.”

She wonders, as she sometimes does, about the other Peggy, the Peggy who Steve had known. Did she set her course and rely on her own confidence, burdened with only the normal intelligence of spy networks and the instincts of her career, or did she feel this same hopelessness sometimes? She must have, Peggy thinks. How could she avoid it when there were wars on too many fronts, injustice all around, when people died on an order from her, died carrying out her orders? 

The thought of simply leaving it all for someone else to take care of, all the effort and difficulty and the wrenching choices abandoned as she finds something that will be enough instead of sometimes too much, has something of its own appeal; she has been doing this for too long to deny that. She cannot pretend to have all of the youthful energy, the bullheaded determination, that she brought to her first assignments. But she recognizes this too: if she left, it would not be clean and guiltless and without consequence, either.

The thought of the other Peggy, the Peggy she might have been, steadies her for a simple reason: she knows that she can survive all this because in another reality, she already did.

“It would help,” she says slowly, her breathing nearly normal again, “if we could find a regular time to discuss these things—”

“Yes.”

“You shouldn’t commit before I’ve even finished,” she admonishes. “You are planning on going back to school, after all.”

“And I’ll still be there for you, whenever you need it.” His voice is so smooth, so confident, but it is never just pretty words with Steve. Her husband is loyalty and dedication and standing up and _trying_ , over and over again. She knows that now more than ever.

She frees her hands from his and dries her face inelegantly, swiping the heels of her palms against her cheeks. Steve sighs slightly and tips her chin up toward him, dabbing at the corners of her eyes with a handkerchief, slightly creased and linty from being shoved in his pocket. She supposes she’s lucky it isn’t stained from wiping something off a child’s face. There's something about the whole that's silly enough that she lets out a watery laugh. She still feels a bit raw, though, and pushes him gently away after just a moment.

"Cup of tea?" he asks tactfully.

"Two sugars," she says. It’s been years since she took sugar in her tea. It is a thing of childhood long left behind. He just nods, though, before walking down the hallway toward the kitchen.

She feels worn now not only from travel and business and distance from home, but from the expulsion of emotion, the release of her doubts. It has been too long since she allowed such things space in the open air. There’s a feeling in her chest as if she just finished a long run. She drops onto the sofa, her limbs loose, her stare open.

It is only then that she notices Rose at the top of the stairs. Rosie is her nighttime self, the kind she would never reveal to rivals or friends or classmates: she wears a voluminous white nightgown with delicate lace appliques and little silken bows, her hair in stubby plaits on either side of her head, her temper in its resting state. But she has her considering face pressed between the bars of the upper landing bannister, looking down; curiosity, as Peggy well knows, is hard to put to sleep.

Peggy tries to think of something to say, some excuse to smooth things over. Even when Rosie was small, at her wildest and most difficult to handle, Peggy had never cried in front of her. She had been very careful of that - predator’s instincts. But Rosie doesn't seem confused or scared.

"I’m glad you’re home, Mom," she whispers, audible in the drifting quiet between the two of them, and rises. She creeps down the hallway, pausing only to tap softly on Nate's door. Peggy wonders if it is a habit she hadn’t noticed or if he is also awake in there too, her sweet boy.

Steve returns then. Peggy doesn't mention Rose as she takes the teacup from him and inhales the steam.

"Are you sure you're going to be alright?" Steve asks. "Remember, you don't have to make decisions tonight."

She tilts a smile toward him. "I'll be fine. 'I can't go on, I'll go on' and all."

“You shouldn’t have to. I think leaving should still be an option.”

“Leaving will always be an option,” she says, her grasp on calm, on professionalism, returning to her. “But I doubt my not leading SHIELD will be the option that will be beneficial to the most people.”

“‘If you can’t do some good simply because you don’t have a badge in hand, then I’m not certain I know you,’” he says, and she gives him a dirty look because he is quoting herself back at her. "If it's too much—"

"I have you," Peggy says, lips against the rim of her cup. "I always have you here. How could I doubt that?"

And that's one thing that the other Peggy never had. It is no trouble to hope that she had someone else to talk to - there is no reason to begrudge her a bit of comfort - but this is one thing Peggy was given along with all of her essential, expansive, terrible knowledge, her endless responsibility: she was given Steve here to carry it all with her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *Radio DJ voice*: Let's turn that happiness down reeeeeeal low.
> 
> I kinda gave Peggy a tall order - not just being a female intelligence agency head in the mid-twentieth century, or controlling huge world issues, but changing the future in specific and deliberate ways and also _not_ stepping in despite knowing how certain scenarios are going to play out - and I wanted to respect that. Luckily we also have the "Steve and Peggy settled, a decade-plus into the relationship" element, which makes it less of a total bummer...yes?


	5. 1985

"Jesus Christ, Drea."

It's not a cell, but the drab office means many of the same things. Steve stays in the doorway watching his daughter grin over at him.

"I thought I had finished with this stuff once Rosie was out of high school," he says, glancing around at the corkboard with its faded lists of policies and rules, a Peanuts comic strip tacked in the corner. "You’re a member of the bar, and you're almost thirty."

"Civil disobedience knows no age limits," Drea reminds him breezily. She stands and he can see in the light of the desk lamp that she is wearing black sweatpants and a plain, matching sweatshirt: burglar casual. (She’s certainly coordinated better than he has. He caught a glimpse in the window on the way in, and bedhead and yesterday’s gardening sweatshirt grabbed from the top of the laundry is not his best look.)

Steve glares at her. "I don't think this exactly counts as civil disobedience."

"Beg to differ, Steve-o." Tony sits up from where he's been dozing on the office couch at the back. "We were perfectly polite - dictionary definition of civil - and we were definitely being disobedient."

"Trust me," Steve says, turning his frown on his godson. "The officers have given me a description about exactly how disobedient you all were."

“Not sure how exact they could have been,” Tony says, trading an amused look with Drea. She was always his favorite babysitter. “Seeing as they don’t know everything.”

“Tony.” Steve pinches the bridge of his nose. “You’re not helping yourself here. You caused trouble on campus, got me up at four in the morning - don’t forget how lucky you are that the phone is on my side of the bed. Your dad’s going to laugh, but let me remind you that your mom never even got a chance to go to college. And Jarvis is turning a hundred and sixty; you’re going to give him a heart attack when he hears about this—”

"And we're definitely sorry for that, sir."

Steve was aware that he was here. The cops had told him, and he's heard enough about Tony's roommate since they arrived at MIT to know that Tony would never attempt a hack without convincing his new best friend to go along with it. But seeing Rhodey curled up against the far arm of Tony’s couch, sleepy-looking and a stranger and _young_ , two whole legs and an ill-considered Air Force ROTC sweatshirt, is bizarre. Steve has known Tony from birth this time around, known him as an infant turned child and now precocious teenager for longer than he'd ever known him as an adult; seeing him is strange only in theory. But Rhodey...

Steve clears his throat. "Luckily for you, things are already closing down before summer term begins so the cops are willing to be lenient and not write up a report on this. Especially because Officer Calloway's daughter just finished class with Professor Carter, and will be getting a very nice recommendation." (Peggy's stint as a visiting lecturer at the Kennedy School last semester had gone well; they've decided to extend their stay in Cambridge through the fall. Which is apparently lucky, with this group menacing their way through Boston.)

"I can't believe you bribed them," Drea says, glee and admonition warring in her voice.

"I'm proud of you," Steve reminds her. "I want to give you every chance to succeed, even when you try to ruin it for yourself with this delayed adolescence bit. Next time maybe don’t take advice from literal adolescents."

Tony says in an injured tone, “Hey, I give great—”

Drea spins to kick him briefly, then brings herself around to face forward again. She stands, stretching, looking sweet and a little young. The chair swivels a bit in her wake. "Thank you, Daddy. And I'll thank Mom when we get home."

"You will," Steve agrees. "So you'll have a few hours to work on that."

"What do you mean?"

"I think some time in here will help develop some real contrition for your actions." Drea's mouth falls open. Tony turns on a glare of his own. "Although, James here seems to be contrite enough already, so I think he deserves to sleep in a bed." Steve opens the door wider and beckons Rhodey forward.

“He’s not wrong,” Rhodey reminds Tony as he weaves around the desk toward the doorway. “You’re the mastermind, remember? And masterminds do the time, not unwilling accomplices.”

“Unwitting,” Tony grumbles to himself, crossing his arms and looking betrayed.

Steve tells the remaining two, "The officers will let the two of you out at shift change tomorrow." He starts to leads Rhodey away.

"You're unbelievable, Dad!" Drea calls down the hall after them. "After all the things Uncle Bucky says you pulled. At least we didn't try to attack a police horse!"

"I tried to sock a cop _on_ a horse," Steve calls back. "And there were extenuating circumstances. It's not nearly the same thing."

* * *

Drea arrives back home just after seven the next morning. Her parents are sitting in side by side wicker chairs on the porch of their rented house on Trowbridge Street, cups of coffee and sections of the newspaper in hand.

"I can't believe you left me there," Drea says as she stomps up the steps. "In a—In a CELL at the MIT police department!"

"It was an office," Steve points out, but his voice is overridden by Drea saying, "Campus police departments are fascist tools full of undertrained staff meant to minimize official reporting and protect a school's reputation, you know."

"Perhaps next time you won't be caught by one, then," Peggy says, trading in the world news for arts and leisure. "Or you can ingratiate yourself to them, work to change them from within rather than fighting against them in such a foolhardy manner."

"The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house, _Mother_ ," Drea says, swishing back her hair. She cut it recently into a bob, which she typically keeps sleekly controlled with hair products. Despite the dishevelment from a night spend plotting and then attempting to sleep in a desk chair, the length flatters her face - but it does means that flicking it around doesn’t quite have the effect she intends. She slams through the screen door anyway as she goes inside to change and acquire her own coffee. Steve snorts a laugh very softly into his mug, still practiced from not revealing that his children’s impertinence sometimes delighted him. Peggy raises a waspish eyebrow at him over her paper, too Sunday satisfied to fully glare.

“Well, she didn’t learn to quote Audre Lorde from me,” Steve points out.

“Don’t pretend to be unintelligent, Steven. It’s not at all becoming.” She raises the newspaper again and says from behind it, “And she certainly didn’t learn to get caught from me.” Steve coughs out something that a discerning ear can recognize as “Marseilles.” She kicks him reflexively. The newspaper barely rustles.

He returns to his article too, or seems to. After a minute, though, he says quietly, “It’s good to see her like this. Breaking rules. No boxes. For a while I thought she’d lost that.”

Peggy folds the paper thoughtfully and covers his hand with hers. “At least Tony’s shenanigans are good for something,” is all she says.

The morning is brightening and already warm. The library across the street is closed until the mid-afternoon on Sundays, but there are a few young voices coming from that direction anyway, probably preparing for some event or practice over at Rindge and Latin. Steve takes in the drifting smell of spring flowers on the air and thinks about here and now.

“Rhodey,” he says, nearly to himself. “I still can’t believe it.” They hadn’t talked much on the way out of the station. Steve hopes that he hadn’t seemed too strange.

Peggy understands quickly; if he didn’t know his wife as well as he does, he wouldn’t see the brief flicker as she registers the name, recalls all the information she has on him. “It was strange to see him?”

“It feels like five minutes ago that no one in the world but me knew that there ever would be someone called James Rhodes. Now he’s a college student.” Steve glances up. There’s a wasp’s nest just being built in the porch eaves; he’ll have to remember to spray later. “The future’s coming on fast,” he says, turning the words over in wonder.

“And we shall certainly be there to meet it,” Peggy tells him, and squeezes his hand. She smiles as she finishes the last of her coffee. “But I wouldn’t get so maudlin, my darling. There’s plenty of future left, and I think our children still have a few surprises for us.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Pranks, called "hacks", have a long, storied, and very fun tradition at MIT. (Although the school does celebrate them once accomplished, you can and will be dealt with if you're actually caught in the process of pulling one off.) Do you really think Tony would just finish his first year and leave without attempting one?
> 
> In the style of The Anthropocene Reviewed, my favorite fact/s that didn't make it into the chapter: Peggy agrees to teach at the Kennedy School even though she think the Kennedy family is significantly overrrated, and Tony has at this point not actually been clued in on the whole "Grant Carter = Steve Rogers = Captain America" thing, he just gave up calling him Uncle Grant early on because all the grownups called him Steve so that was probably the way to go.


	6. 1950

They take the train up from Washington. They had driven down the first time - though they hadn’t left Howard’s until Bucky was healthy enough to travel, he was still breaking in some ways, wildly fragile. They needed to have no one else around, needed the time and ability to stop on the roadside so Bucky could gasp in fresh air and scream through clenched teeth because just sitting in a car with people he trusted made him feel closed-in and trapped.

Bucky sits between them at first, all of them pretending that it’s simply the order they entered the row rather than a supportive bracketing. He switches seats with Peggy after about an hour, trying to use the scenery rushing past the window as a distraction. His fingers, both sets, curl and uncurl in his lap. He had planned on leaving the arm behind - the one Howard made for him detaches fairly easily, and he figured that seeing him simply missing a limb would in some ways be easier than the blunt, inhuman metal - but changed his mind at the last minute. This is part of him now, whenever he wanted it to be, and he tries to convince himself it will be better for everyone to face that from that start.

Peggy puts her hand over his balled fists before he even registers exactly how tightly they are clenched.

* * *

They had tried at first to get him reacclimated in New York. Howard’s large house had been fine when that just meant finding his memories again, when it was only about having a quiet place where everyone understood nightmares and knew to step loudly and never to touch Bucky when he wasn’t ready for it. It had worked well enough when it was just Steve and Bucky, the quiet and caring Jarvises, Peggy on the weekends and Howard dashing in and out. And they all had thought that the city - large and anonymous, the site of so many remarkable things - would be the perfect place to start when it came time to take on somewhere more public; any scene Bucky caused would be forgotten by the time the witnesses reached the next block. But it was all too newly familiar, too overwhelming with strangers and crowded with memories, too _much_.

They hadn’t had a chance to visit Brooklyn. (If Steve were a bit more selfish, it would hurt that he still hasn’t seen those ever familiar streets, the place he still goes when he dreams. As it is, he doesn't even have time to think about it as more than a hope for his friend.) On Bucky’s hoarse, wild-eyed orders, they hadn’t even mentioned to his family that he had been found.

Peggy and Steve’s neighborhood in DC was easier. In the type of close-knit environment that they had thought best avoided, where everyone knew their names and no one forgot exactly who they had seen shatter one of the cafe’s mugs into an explosion of porcelain dust just from hearing old Mrs. Eissenmann’s accent, they found compassion. Al noticed the way Bucky flinched away from photos of Korea and East Berlin on the newspaper fronts, and tucked them away so that the covers of _Life_ and _The Saturday Evening Post_ were visible instead. Bucky learned to answer questions about his arm from the innocent, interested ones the kids asked before they were hushed by their parents. The ticket taker at the movie house, Eddy Carroll from two streets over, didn’t say anything as Steve and Bucky left in the middle of _Annie Get Your Gun_ twice because the sound of even comical movie gunfire made Bucky flinch and go cold and grasp for a gun of his own.

There were other people in the neighborhood who had served. There was a look that Bucky recognized when they passed each other in the street, a certain shift to alertness at car horns sounded suddenly, and when they asked him to have a beer with them, he said yes. While Steve and Peggy went out on one of their evenings together, he sat on a barstool with these men who would become his friends and talked about favorite books and movies and radio programs, about the best ballgames they’d seen, about the particular, muffled punch of a bullet entering flesh and the strange, grim, necessary realization that you were the one to put it there.

“Why did you invite me tonight?” he asked, walking home with Charlie Gibbs in the place by his side that was usually Steve’s. “You don’t even know me, but you’ve probably guessed that I’m more of a handful than most.”

Charlie chewed his toothpick thoughtfully for a moment. He took it out and held it between his fingers as he said, “We all have brothers who didn’t come back. We have to be there for the ones that did, even if they left a piece of themselves behind. Code of war doesn’t end just because the treaty’s been signed.”

And when the cold came, not as bad there as in New York or the Alps or Russia or places that he can’t quite and might never remember, when the cold came and made Bucky shiver and wish for a hot drink but didn’t leave him paralyzed with the fear of what might come, he said that he was ready to go home.

* * *

They called ahead. Of course they did.

“Can you imagine, someone you love and thought was dead just turning up out of the sky as you’re trying to eat your breakfast?” Peggy asked, eyes wide in pretend shock.

“I thought it was a good surprise,” Steve said defensively.

“Oliver in the kitchen has taken a liking to me, as you well know. I think the extra treat I get with my order is all the surprise I need.” She gave his hand a fond touch on the tabletop, regardless of her words or her arch tone.

“Fine, everyone knows you’re adorable, you can quit showing it off,” Bucky said, and it was the joking eyeroll more than anything that convinced them that he was ready.

* * *

They can see Mrs. Barnes from down the block. She is wearing a navy dress with creamy lace trim - her church dress, Steve is sure, even if it is not the gray number with the big silver broach that he remembers from his childhood. She stands on her front steps, solid as a lighthouse. Bucky’s father is most likely inside; he had always gotten emotional easily and never liked to show it in public.

It’s a chilly, overcast Tuesday, the middle of a morning that threatens rain or snow or both. The street is empty of the usual schoolkids or housewives chatting to their neighbors with shopping in hand. It makes it easier: no one to double take and recognize them, catch them up in excited conversation. It makes it harder, the overly noticeable sound of their footsteps seeming a driving echo as they move closer.

“You remember back in ‘26, when I was sick from Halloween until New Year’s?” Steve asks, because Bucky is pulling sharp breaths through his nose and his shoulders are set with a statue’s rigidity.

The beginning of the familiar story seems to ease something. “They had the priest in for last rites twice that time, didn’t they?”

“Three times, I think,” Steve says with a casual shrug, at which Peggy looks vaguely horrified. “You kept trying to play truant, coming up the fire escape when no one was looking.”

“And I started getting escorted to school with a lecture about the wonders of public education, but my ma couldn’t stay all day, so she told my cousin Frankie to sit on the street corner and scream if he saw me coming.” Bucky leans over and says conspiratorially to Peggy, “I would give Frankie a penny a week to keep his trap shut. He was a soft touch.”

“But then my mother asked Sister Mary Bernardus to sit with me while she went to work, and that nun almost kicked you out the window when she saw your face coming over the sill while she was just trying to pray the Rosary,” Steve finishes with a muted smile. He bumps Bucky’s shoulder with his. “If you could still face your mother after that, you can face her now.”

And then she is coming down to meet them, slow and careful even in her sensible, square-toed shoes. She holds onto the handrail, although there’s no ice on the steps. Bucky has stopped two houses away - the Green’s place, or it had been fifteen years ago. He seems as if he can’t move forward. Any shimmer of ease has gone out of him again.

Mrs. Barnes walks the rest of the way to him herself. Steve had forgotten how small and solid she looks beside her son. She reaches her hands up and holds his face between them, and doesn’t say anything for a long moment.

When she finally speaks, it is in that husky voice with its second-generation Irish tinge. Somewhere inside himself, Steve still expects to hear his mother’s bright call twining with hers, a harmony of care. “James. My boy, come back to me.”

Bucky stays very still. “Hi, Ma,” he manages, and lets her lead him inside.

* * *

Bucky’s family had always seemed enormous to Steve, though anything would have when compared with a pair of Rogerses. Winifred Barnes was the youngest of three sisters, George had four brothers, and most of the extended clan lived close enough to take the streetcar if they couldn’t walk. The Barnes place had always been so _full_.

Without it being mentioned, they haven’t asked anyone over today. George is sitting in his usual chair. Bucky’s sister Josephine stands over his shoulder, her body taut beneath her neat sweater. Rebecca paces the room, a baby in her arms, and Steve’s first thought is that she’s too young for that, just a baby herself, but that isn’t true anymore. The man who must be Becca’s husband sits looking more awkward than anyone - perhaps because he’s entirely a stranger to Bucky, perhaps because he’s all gangly limbs, too tall for the furniture.

“It looks the same,” Bucky says, taking in the faded wallpaper, once a patterned green now white, the heavy old General Electric wall clock which still has the crack across the face, the good lace cloth dressing up the table. The scent of coffee from the ever-boiling pot fills the place, and it is this that makes Steve remember how long it has truly been since he was last here: growing up, he would never have even noticed it.

Mrs. Barnes has set out a stack of saucers and one of her delectably heavy lemon pound cakes on the tabletop. As she leads Steve, Peggy and Bucky over to sit around it, she still hasn’t let go of her son’s hands.

Becca bursts into tears, which makes the baby start wailing too. George covers his eyes with his palms, the unknown husband looks entirely out of his depth, and Peggy stands again. “Let’s have a seat,” she says, guiding Becca over beside her husband. She gets her settled against the cushions, then passes the baby from his mother’s arms to his startled but silent father. Peggy strokes a soothing hand over the baby’s crown as she completes the transfer; it doesn’t help but does make Becca give a shaky little smile. The radio is over in the corner and Peggy walks over, snaps it on, and tunes it quickly until she finds an afternoon symphony program on WNYC. She adjusts the volume to midlevel and turns back.

“For the neighbors,” she explains as she comes over to rejoin Steve by the table. Once again, as always, Steve is impressed: the Barnes apartment is the entire first floor of the frame house, but that doesn’t entirely mean privacy. He hadn’t even considered that anyone else might be home, but now that he thinks about it, the water rushing through the pipes isn’t coming from anyone in this room.

“How did you get here?” Josie asks suddenly. She hasn’t so much as shifted through the outburst of chaos.

“The subway,” Bucky tells her promptly, and she snaps, “Don’t give me that, James Barnes,” in what must be her schoolteacher voice now. Steve’s already familiar with it: Josie was younger than Bucky by a bit less than a year, but she had always acted the big sister to the both of them. “We got an army notification half a decade ago that you’d been killed. We got a letter from—” She turns on Steve. “And _you_. What are you doing here looking ten years older than you should instead of dead from saving the world?”

“Josephine,” says Mrs. Barnes, warning in her tone, “they’re back. What does it matter where they’ve been?” But her husband lifts his face and says, mastering himself with clear effort, “No, Winifred, I would also like to know exactly what’s happened.”

“What’s wrong with your arm?” Becca asks, her voice very soft, as if it is being trapped in the needlepoint pillow she has pressed against her chest.

The version they tell is one they've practiced, a snipped and pasted version of the truth, but Steve still isn’t a particularly good liar. It's not that he doesn't trust these people who have been family to him - he knows that they would never go to the police or the press with anything he told them, that they wouldn’t gossip about it in the shops. But they have never seen a person explode in front of them in a blue flash, have known his transformation only as something already completed out of sight. Their lives have been so normal, untouched by direct contact with the strange and wonderful and terrible things with which Steve is familiar.

Unless he misses his guess, the baby Rebecca's husband is currently rocking back to sleep is Jimmy Proctor. Steve has met him as a sixty year old man, a former railroad engineer with a million stories of an entirely typical childhood sparkling with the little memories his mother would recall of her brother. He doesn't want to take that from all of them.

So, knowing his own abilities, he is careful with his contributions, letting Bucky and Peggy tell most of the story: of Steve suspended in the ice, the serum effecting him in unexpected ways, of his being found and coming to Washington, the information slipped to Peggy that made them go looking for Bucky in the first place. Bucky doesn’t remember many of the details of his time in captivity anyway; Peggy glosses over it with quick compassion that brings them past without the rest of the Barnes family asking for more information.

Watching Bucky now, Steve finds himself remembering more than ever his friend as he was. Buck had always been the one to tell the stories, to make excuses and conjure the sweet, sly smiles to get them out of trouble. Bucky now, Bucky as he once would have been, is quieter. Steve doesn't mind it, but it's more noticeable back in this familiar place.

There's a silence when the story has finished.

"And now you're fine?" Josie asks finally. She has begun to lean on the back of her father's chair, not softening as much as weakening when confronted with it all. "Now you're back?"

"For now," Bucky says.

His mother looks up from the hands she has clenched in her lap. "What do you mean by that? We've a room here for you while you get yourself settled. There's no reason to go anywhere. I’m sure your things can be sent up for you."

"Ma," Bucky says gently, "I don't think I'm ready yet."

"And why is that?" She draws herself up straight, some of the strict force coming back into her tone. "You're doing just fine, and what would you do somewhere else anyway?"

Steve opens his mouth, but Bucky says, "One day I might come to stay, but now there's a life I'm trying to make down in Washington. I'd like to see how it turns out."

"So I'm never to see you?" She turns to her husband with a cry. "Listen to this boy of yours, George."

"Mama." Steve knows that it's the way Bucky sighs it that makes the difference, that brings the tension from the room. "Of course you’ll see me. I'm going to come back."

"And when will that be?" George asks.

"It's three weeks until Christmas," Bucky points out. "I think I could use a good Brooklyn Christmas."

"All of you," Winifred commands, standing suddenly and clapping her hands together. She pulls the cake plate toward herself and begins to cut slices. "You'll all come for Christmas. Unless there's some other family I don't know of?" She looks askance at Peggy.

"We shall reserve tickets on our way back," Peggy says with equanimity.

"Home again for Christmas, then," says Winifred, satisfied enough as she begins handing out cake.

Later, Bucky will hold his namesake for the first time and Rebecca will cry again, and so will George. Later, Rebecca’s husband will be introduced and will not wince as his hand is shaken three times with a bit too much force to be strictly comfortable. Later, Mrs. Barnes will try to give her cake recipe to Peggy only to have it intercepted by Steve. Later, they will all laugh as Josie describes her students and her roommate and their little apartment two neighborhoods over. Later, Steve will notice Bucky taking himself into the kitchen for a moment alone before they are pressed to stay the night. Later, they will lie in the preserved bedroom with its old Dodgers scorecards peeling from the walls, and Bucky will tease Steve for not daring to mention that there’s really no reason to have him and Peggy in separate rooms based on their sleeping arrangements back home. Later, they will lie awake for a long time before they are finally lulled by the familiar sounds outside the window. But for now:

"Home again," Steve agrees softly, and digs into his piece of cake.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Early update - I'll be offline Sunday for Shavuot, so happy z'man matan torateinu to you as well I guess?
> 
> hansbekhart's [How to Brooklyn posts](https://hansbekhart.tumblr.com/tagged/how-to-brooklyn) over on tumblr were helpful reading as I was writing this, as were the very comprehensive WNYC archives, but there are a couple of subtle Tree Grows in Brooklyn references hidden in here as well - my copy is absolutely falling apart because I've read it so many times, and it has certainly influenced the way I see and write about Steve and Bucky's childhood.


	7. 1968

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a Father's Day one, heads up. Also: for the duration of this story, every time Emma is in a room, the assumption should be that the conversation is in ASL unless specifically stated otherwise.

One thing Steve lost fairly quickly from his days of military and later Avenging service: he doesn’t feel the need to be up as soon as morning comes. Most days he has to anyway - there are squabbles to be adjudicated or classes to attend or school drop offs to take care of - and he doesn’t technically need a lot of sleep, but on a weekend, he likes to take the opportunity to just stay in bed.

It’s 5:24 on Sunday morning and he is up and at the bedroom door before he realizes exactly why. When the crashing sound from the kitchen below does register fully, he stops with a hand on the doorknob, sighs, and climbs back under the light summer blanket he switched to last week.

“I thought you had made it clear that you were looking for a very simple celebration of Father’s Day,” Peggy says, rolling to face him. He forgets, sometimes, how lucky he is to get to see her with her hair mussed, to hear her voice with the hoarseness of waking, and the forgetting is lucky in its own way too.

Steve says, “I guess maybe they thought I was joking,” already imagining the collection of dreadful ties and the half completed washing of his car that he is surely going to be faced with later.

(He can’t wait for the cards, though. The kids make them by hand for birthdays and holidays, and he’s kept every one he’s ever received.)

Peggy yawns and shuts her eyes again, even as there’s a sound from downstairs that is most likely one of their plates being clapped between two hands before it falls to the kitchen linoleum. (There’s a reason that their china is locked away in the dining room hutch.) “At least it’s Emma who’s put herself in charge of your surprise breakfast.”

He makes an affirming noise. “Nice of the rest of them not to make me smile through another year of oversalted eggs and burned toast.” All of the kids _can_ cook, or at least have age-appropriate kitchen skills, but some of them are better at it than others.

“More likely they didn’t want to get up this early,” Peggy points out, eyes still closed although she's clearly not going back to sleep. Steve pokes her with his toes, despite the fact that she’s right.

"Should we go down and supervise if there’s cooking going on?" he asks as the scent of cinnamon and melting butter starts to waft upstairs a few minutes later.

"It's meant to be a surprise for you."

"Okay, so I can't go down, but someone can."

"I certainly hope you aren't suggesting that I do it."

"I supervised Mother's Day breakfast preparation."

"Yes, well, we all make our own choices, Steve," she says frankly. "You have the nose of a bloodhound for burning, and you know how capable Emma is in the kitchen. She'll be fine. And you needn’t be so nervous about it: you spent your youth dodging streetcars by a hairsbreadth and getting into alley fights, and you survived."

"I don't know that I want any of them taking my example."

She slides over toward him. The sheets, still fresh from yesterday, make crisp sounds around her as she nestles on her side against his body. "It's too late for that," she says. "They've inherited something by osmosis, I'm afraid. Though you're a fairly good example now."

"Yeah?" and even he is surprised to hear the vulnerability in his voice.

Peggy shifts back enough to look him squarely in the face. "I'm certainly proud to have you as the father of my children," she says. "And I couldn't ask for a better partner."

The sun is just brightening the curtains. Despite the bare sunlight and the still cool morning, the fan is turning above their bed. Steve lies on his back watching it as he says, “It’s harder than I thought it would be. I wonder if I’m doing or saying the right thing. I wonder if we’re making the right decisions.”

She doesn’t force him to look at her, instead pressing her lips to his shoulder, resting silently against the white cotton undershirt he wears (he has no patience for button-up pajama tops). Finally she says, “I suspect you will always wonder. Unlike so very much in your life, there is no way to tell how things will turn out with them, no informed prediction you can make about your choices. In this, you are working just as directionlessly as everyone else.”

“Any advice?” he asks, a bit plaintively, although he knows that they have precisely the same amount of parenting experience. She laughs.

“Keep on, my darling,” she says, eyes crinkled in sleepy fondness and with the lines that no longer entirely go away. He turns over toward her, cupping her cheek in one hand and kissing her mouth gently as the sunlight continues to brighten their bedroom. He doesn’t pull away until they hear the sound of small footsteps, slower and more burdened than usual, making their way up the stairs.

“You’re still terrible at undercover work,” Peggy says from the corner of her mouth, the footsteps growing closer as they feign sleep.

“I’m only trying to fool a ten-year-old,” he says indignantly.

“Best of luck,” she mutters, eye closing fully as their door opens and Emma bounds in as much as she can while weighed down.

“What’s this?” Steve asks, realizing belatedly that with his sky-high eyebrows exaggerating his surprised question, he’s forgotten to appear sleepy. Emma doesn’t seem to notice, indicating with excited bobs of her chin that he should sit up against the headboard. Once he’s obeyed, she rests the tray (the one Steve usually uses to carry soup when someone’s sick in bed) on his lap.

She settles herself at the foot of the bed and sings out, “Happy Father’s Day!” Her fingers fly over the words, a grin apparent on her face.

“Thanks, Em.” He takes a bite of the omelette - impressively turned over and cooked through, although overstuffed with practically the entire contents of a vegetable garden, as Steve’s well-known for eating nearly anything - still chewing as he sets down his fork and asks, “Did you make all this yourself?”

“Yes,” she says, nodding her head vigorously along with her hand. “Everyone else - I tried to wake them up, but they were all too tired.” She pouts as she adds, “Rosie promised she would get up - then she was asleep again!”

“You did a wonderful job - and all alone,” Peggy praises, levering herself up and breaking off a bit of the fresh cinnamon scone that rests on its own little plate. “Delicious,” she declares, then, moving her eyebrows teasingly, “but where are the c-u-r-r-a-n-t-s?” (They’ve never found an exact sign for the word, and Peggy likes being precise.)

Emma sticks out her tongue. She and Steve have an excellent oatmeal cookie recipe that she refuses to add raisins to, and she’s long declined to care about what her mother declares the “proper” preparation of scones.

“Dad likes _good_ food,” she says primly, and Steve’s shoulder shake with laughter.

“Don’t encourage her!” Peggy says, the broadness of her gestures belying the words. “This campaign against dried fruit - it must stop.”

“Where did the flower come from?” Steve asks quickly. At the corner of the tray, their smallest and most narrow vase holds a single yellow-centered daffodil, its white petals fluttering a bit in the breeze from the fan.

“I picked it from the garden.” She points to the bottom. “Look - I put in water to take care of it, like you taught me.”

“Just like you taught her,” Peggy says aloud, and Steve ducks his head.

When he is able to look up again, he says, “This is _amazing_ , Emma,” the words wide and effusive. He motions for her to lean forward, and adds with furtive movements close to his body, hands like a secret, “I think this might be my best present this year.”

“Wait,” she says, her hands whispering too. “You haven’t seen the tie Drea and Nate got for you.” She breaks into laughter, and Steve, helpless, follows her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I do have some background in ASL/Deaf culture, but the posts [FAQ on Writing Signed Language](https://concerningwolves.tumblr.com/post/169084548979/faq-on-writing-signed-language) and [Further Notes on Writing Signed Language](https://concerningwolves.tumblr.com/post/170197552819/further-notes-on-writing-signed-language) by concerningwolves on tumblr were particularly helpful in figuring out how to translate ASL dialogue into written fiction.


	8. 1951

Elaine Macy was someone else before she married, but now she is this: just the right smile at just the right time, quick with a joke though careful about it (nothing too frequent, or too flashy - it doesn’t do to be known as a funny girl), the correct outfit to camouflage herself for any occasion and a handbag to match. 

She has the feeling that Alice Little is the same.

Alice is new to it, certainly, barely two months married to one of the chiefs on the CIA Russia desk. (Elaine isn’t meant to know that, but it isn’t hard to tell. That used to be Elaine’s husband Paul’s job, and John Little puffed out his chest in the same way.) Still, there’s a bright, considered glimmer to her eye as she takes in the party from her place beside Elaine, a calculus of everyone there and mental map of how they are all connected and interwoven that Elaine recognizes from herself.

"Who's that over there?" Alice asks, apparently already having perfected the casual 'point and sip' maneuver that Elaine knows well.

Elaine takes a sip of her own drink while glancing over. "Oh, that's Mr. Butrick. Richard Butrick?" she adds at Alice's questioning look. "He was the ambassador to Iceland until a year or two ago, but now he's been made Director General of the Foreign Service." She laughs, a little party laugh that makes Alice give a smile that's more about commiseration than actual enjoyment. "Why, I guess that makes him the boss of this whole thing."

"What about the Secretary of State?" Alice asks. She sounds casually keen, but doesn't bother scanning around herself: she _is_ good at this. "Isn't he the real boss?"

"I suppose," Elaine says. She takes another sip of her drink, larger this time, trying to get most of it down before it gets warm without seeming like a lush. "But Mr. Acheson is a busy man. A little get together at the Finnish consulate isn't exactly going to lure him out of either his office or his living room. I don’t think that he comes out for anyone less than the Swiss."

"It is a lovely party, though," Alice says, a bit too earnestly. Youth and inexperience coming out, Elaine decides; she had been like that once, impressed by everything in Paul's world, or at least looking to pretend that she was. "This isn't the sort of thing that tempts Mr. Acheson?"

"Well, he is nearly sixty, dear," Elaine points out. "Already overworked, I'm sure, poor man, and not exactly interested in spending a night out if he doesn't have to. And he apparently enjoys the company of his wife, so I'm afraid nothing here holds much appeal."

"Hmm." Alice smooths her hair a bit, starting to slip into a sort of polite boredom. (The flicker of something across her face - disappointment, or maybe annoyance? - must be imagined, Elaine tells herself.) Then her expression brightens and she says, even more quietly but with a bit of mischief to it, "I hope _he_ doesn't have a wife, or I'll feel like such a boor for staring."

Elaine laughs. She knows exactly who’s caught her eye. This isn't her first time guiding someone through the disappointment. “He’s extremely taken, unfortunately. That’s Grant Carter. He’s married to Peggy Carter - see her over there, speaking with the young fellow from the embassy?”

“What does she do?” Alice asks, watching as Peggy Carter tilts her head and uses one hand to illustrate a point.

Elaine thinks it a bit strange that she assumes Peggy works, but Alice has certainly proven perceptive and there’s a strong air of competence to Peggy that doesn’t just speak of children wrangled and supper on the table come hell or high water. In fact, for the first time, Elaine consciously realizes that the Carters are practically the only couple divided yet speaking to people not of their same sex; nearly everyone else is either in a group conversation involving their spouse, or has broken off into male and female pairs.

“Elaine?”

“Oh, yes, sorry. She’s—” She knows exactly what Peggy Carter does - she’s heard Paul refer to her as “that _bitch_ from SHIELD” often enough - but something in Alice’s face, an eagerness even more strange for the way she tries to conceal it, makes her change course. “I think she’s a secretary for someone at State. Perhaps the Bureau of Public Affairs? I’m not certain. We’ve never really spoken.”

“Oh well,” Alice says, so cheerfully that Elaine wonders whether she had mistaken her prior expression. “How about her husband? Have you ever spoken to him?”

“Yes, and he’s an absolute doll,” Elaine confides. “You wouldn’t think it, with those looks, but he’s just the nicest man. Why don’t we go over and meet him?”

Alice blushes a pretty rose. “Oh, I couldn’t. He’s talking to Caroline.”

“Coralie,” Elaine corrects automatically, and she has the sudden feeling that the mistake had been purposeful, some sort of test. She shakes her head, shakes it off; surely that’s ridiculous. Alice has just been introduced to a few dozen people tonight and she can’t be expected to remember every name. “Anyway, they won’t mind. Come with me.”

She leads Alice through the party, taking the opportunity to leave her empty glass on one of the heavy oak sideboards. Elaine is...well, she prefers “petite” but in truth it’s more like “diminutive,” and with her slight frame and soft voice, she can be lost in a crowd without much trouble. Grant Carter, tall and broad, is easy to keep in her sights, however, and they reach him after only one awkward incident of skirting a listing, red-faced Danish diplomat. 

“Grant,” Elaine says warmly as he and Coralie shift to greet them. “Wonderful to see you. This is Alice Little. I think you’ve met her husband John?”

“Once or twice,” says Grant, smiling toward Alice. He has, Elaine notices, the closest teeth she’s ever seen to a film star. “It’s nice to meet you, Alice.”

Alice catches her breath a bit, which Elaine understands perfectly. She typically prefers clean-shaven men, but there’s a quality about Grant Carter that makes him difficult to look at, as if he’s something a bit more than human. It takes one a moment to entirely get their wits back once caught in his gaze.

“I used that cornbread recipe of yours to make muffins last weekend,” Elaine covers smoothly, “and I got absolutely rave reviews.” Well, a grunted, “Good,” from Paul, hidden behind the morning paper as he spread on more butter, but that was a high compliment from him.

“Isn’t that a wonderful recipe?” Coralie says, more enthusiastically than the comment truly warrants. “My family enjoys it so much.”

“Good to hear. It’s a favorite of mine too. When Peggy and I got together, that was the only thing I knew how to make. A friend gave me the recipe.” Grant still wears that lovely smile, but there’s something sad about his eyes, and Coralie glares over the top of her glass at Elaine as if to say that he had been in a perfectly _fine_ mood before they showed up.

“You cook? I’m not sure that John even knows where the kitchen is,” Alice says with a sweet little giggle. Elaine remembers a time when she too thought it darling that her husband who had been to war could barely make himself a sandwich, when she felt so wonderfully grownup and responsible in her particular domain. She pities her past self, pities the future Alice, the one who will simply learn to carry on once the bloom has come off that particular rose. “Does your wife really make you take care of such things, Mr. Carter?”

“She has other things to take care of,” he says simply. “So I take care of her.” He looks over at Peggy, now speaking with the deputy attache of something or other, and the tenderness in his gaze somehow hits Elaine more deeply than the sadness there had. She swallows hard, wishing she had not finished her drink.

“What exactly does your wife do?” Alice asks. For all the sharpness that Elaine had quietly admired, it’s poorly done, too eager and badly timed; there’s nearly an audible effect as Grant turns his gaze back from his wife.

“She works with Mr. Howard,” he says. “At the State Department’s Bureau of Public Affairs.”

Elaine looks away to avoid giving him a sharp glance - how in the world could he have heard her invented story from all the way across the room? - but her eyes quickly fall on something which distracts her: Paul stumbling a bit as he makes his way over to her, the glass in his hand emptied for what she knows is not the first time this evening. (Everyone had pretended that the move from an international bureau to domestic was a gift to him, an easier job in return for years of service, but the truth was that the USSR was disintegrating and Paul couldn’t be trusted to be involved in such delicate business.)

“‘Laine,” he says, as he approaches, that familiarly clumsy pronunciation of her name. He pulls her against himself with too much force and not enough circumspection. Elaine separates herself as much as she can - this dress does crease so easily, after all - but he keeps a grip on her.

“Bit of a late night, isn’t it?” Grant says, and his voice suddenly has a new note to it, a solidity with an edge of menace that she’s never heard before. “Why don’t we all share a taxi and head home?”

“Carter—!” Paul starts, loudly and with obvious dislike, but Elaine drapes an arm about his shoulders, quieting him carefully.

“You’re right, Grant, it is getting a little late, but we have our car with us.” She laughs, too high, and forces her next words to be casual. “I drove here tonight. And to think my father didn’t even want me to learn!”

Grant looks as if he is going to protest, but perhaps he senses the way she is fighting just to keep looking at him. He nods, and his eyes follow, watchful, as she and Paul leave the party. She has the feeling that he is not fooled by the way it seems that they are walking out together.

“How gentlemanly of you to offer them a ride,” Alice chimes behind them, and Elaine’s last glimpse of the room is of her touching his arm and leaning far too close to him. She suppresses a snort. Alice has good instincts and there’s certainly raw material there, but she’ll have to learn to do a bit better than that if she’s going to learn to fit in Washington.

* * *

“I could likely have dropped a brick on his head and he would have kept talking,” Peggy calls from the bedroom. Steve can hear one of her dresser drawers opening and sliding shut again. “Thanks goodness you came to collect me or I would likely still be listening to him prattle.” She comes into the kitchen in her comfortable, heavy dressing gown and takes the cup of darkly steeped tea that he’s made for her, giving him a smile. He narrows his eyes back at her, because he knows that she doesn’t keep her robe in the dresser, and now he’ll be spending the time until they go to bed imagining what she’s chosen to put on underneath. It just makes her smile more widely as she sits down at the table.

“Did I see you speaking with Elaine Macy?” she asks innocently, bringing the tea gently to her lips and looking at him over the rim.

“Until her husband interrupted,” he says darkly. He likes Elaine very much. They both do.

“She was a factory floor supervisor during the war, you know. In charge of nearly a hundred people, and she’d started nurses training on the side. And now she’s tucked away at home, forced to smile and pretend everything’s alright because no one thinks she should strive for anything else.” She sighs. “It gets better, doesn’t it?”

“It does.” He leans against the counter, arms crossed. “But not soon enough, and not necessarily better enough.” The look they share lasts a long time.

“I saw you speaking to someone else as well,” she finally says. “Alice Little? I haven’t had the pleasure.”

“I have the feeling you will soon enough. It’s just like we thought. Although if these are the agents they’re sending for their ‘two more shall take its place’ bit, they’re in more disarray than we knew. Unless they’re just looking to fool us about how many moles they might still have planted, I think they’re truly desperate.” She frowns, and he knows she’s remembering Dottie Underwood, so entirely inhabiting a persona that Peggy, living next door, had never even suspected. “She had so many tells that even I picked up on them, and she wasn’t exactly subtle when she got close enough to stick a tracker in my pocket.”

“I had wondered why you left your jacket in the taxi.”

“If they want to find out where we live, they can put in the effort to try to follow me home from the market. Anyway, I thought it might make things easier if they didn’t think I’d been tipped. They’ll show up at a taxi lot in the middle of the night and probably decide that I’m just absent-minded and she should have put it somewhere else.” He tries not to think of the punishments these people dole out for failure. Alice, or whatever her real name is, might be dangerous to Peggy, dangerous to the world and to him, but she’s also a person who has been terribly mistreated. 

“Well, how lucky she didn’t slip it into another pocket, then. If it had been your trousers they found there, it would have been hard to explain as absent-mindedness.” She sets her cup down, only a little skim of liquid left in the bottom, and adds, “Although I suppose they could presume I distracted you somehow.”

“I’m not sure that even you could distract me enough for me to forget my pants.”

“Is that a challenge? Because I’m certainly willing to try.”

“Maybe another time.” He grins at her. There are so many other times for them now. “Tonight I’m more interested in a different kind of investigation.” His gaze is very apparent as it drops to the place where her robe has opened a bit at the top.

She says in a lightly dubious tone, “That’s not usually your forte,” finger running idly around the rim of her cup.

“I’m learning from the best.” He pushes away from the counter. “Would you really deny me a chance to practice?”

“I suppose not.” She fakes a sighs and takes his hands, standing to lead him back toward the bedroom. There is still plenty to be done, but there are also plenty of tomorrows to do it in, and they’ll accomplish it all together. 


	9. 1961

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is written in...a particular style, so if it ends up bugging you, next week will be back to more typical business.

I am the first person in my class to be in a wedding. Joanie Merrill went toher neighbor’s wedding last year, but that is _not the same thing_ at all. Being in a wedding is _very different_ and _much better_.

I have known about my special job for six months, which is almost a year, and I kept it a secret for one whole month before Patty Fucci said to me in a mean way in the play yard that I should stop talking about the wedding because it was not so special and I counted to ten like Daddy taught me and said in a very nice voice, “Well, I am going to be an _important participant_ , so I need time to plan and practice so I can make it _perfect_ , Patty, and maybe you don’t understand that but _so there_.”

Then I maybe stomped on her foot, but only a little.

(Daddy told me that maybe I need to go back to counting to twenty, but he just doesn’t understand how it is in the third grade. It is _very hard_ , and you need to Stand Up For Yourself and have A Strategy, like Mumma tells me when we play chess.)

On the morning of the wedding, I wake up Mumma and Daddy early, which is another Important Job, so I gave it to myself. I tiptoe into their room when it is still dark-dark out and I am going to whisper good morning, but Daddy sits up very fast and yells out, “What’s wrong?” before I even say anything. (He always does this, and it always makes me jump but also I like it because it means that if something is wrong, like when I threw up in the night, Daddy is ready to help me right away.)

“Nothing is wrong,” I say, and because now he is awake I go and jump onto the bed and crawl over him to the warm place in the middle. Daddy makes a big groaning sound from my knees and elbows poking him but I know it is pretend because I am small and he is very strong and my elbows are _only a_ _little sharp_. “But we should start getting ready if we don’t want to be late - Uncle Bucky’s wedding is going to start _very soon_.”

“Not for another nine hours, it isn’t,” says Mumma into her pillow.

Daddy is sitting up a little, rubbing his eyes and yawning. “Rosie,” he says, “what time did we say was okay to get up today?”

“Six o’clock.” We talked about it for a long time when I was going to bed last night.

“And what time is it now?”

“Three o’clock.”

“So why are you here?”

“Because six o’clock was _too late_ and it meant that we would be late to the wedding and I did not want you to be embarrassed.” I snuggle under their blanket. “I was _helping_ you. You always say helping is important!”

“You have a different helping job,” Daddy reminds me. “Maybe think about that instead.”

So I do for a while and I guess I forget how _very important_ the Getting Up Early job is because I seem to fall asleep for a little bit. When I wake up again, Daddy is not in the room and it is not dark-dark out anymore, it is _very bright_. So I do the fast sitting up now and say, “What’s happening?”

“It’s just after eight o’clock,” Mumma says. She is over at the closet, making sure all of our wedding clothes look nice. “We’ll leave at nine, so you have some time to eat breakfast before then.”

I almost don’t eat breakfast to show that I’m angry that they didn’t listen to me _and_ that they let me sleep, but eating is important to stay healthy and strong and do a good job. And since it’s very important that I do a good job today (and I am also maybe a little hungry), I go downstairs. In the kitchen, Daddy says, “Good morning, Rosie,” is a happy voice, but I say it back in a grumpy way to show him my Real and Honest Mood.

“What was that?” he says in the way where he pretends not to hear when I am rude, even though Daddy has _extremely very good_ _hearing_.

So I do a big sigh and say, “Good morning, Daddy” in a nicer voice, and he says, “Thank you,” and gives me a plate with toast cut in triangles and a boiled egg in my special egg cup, which is yellow with red shoes painted on the feet and it says “Eggs on Legs” on the middle. Just when I finish eating, Mumma comes in with Emma and says it is almost time to go, so I run to get dressed in my car clothes and then I run around making sure everything is ready, until Mumma says that she double checked and we have the car all packed and if we don’t go now we will Really Be Late, so all there is to do is get in the backseat and do signing with Emma about the wedding until she falls asleep because she is still little and driving in the car makes her take naps.

Everyone is getting ready in the same place, and when we get there, it is already busy busy busy. I go into the kitchen first, because I have _manners_ , and also because Mumma makes me, following behind me holding Emma by the hand while Daddy takes his suit and goes to find Uncle Bucky.

“Hi Nana,” I say, hoping that if I talk fast, Nana Barnes will do it too and won’t keep me for too long.

“Hello, Rose,” she says, and her voice is extra slow, like she knows what I was trying to do, but she does not use my middle name so I know that I am not in Any Actual Trouble.

Nana Barnes is not 100% my grandma (she is Uncle Bucky’s mother, and because Uncle Bucky is like my daddy’s brother, she is sort of like Daddy’s mother too) but Mumma and Daddy once weren’t my parents either, so I am An Expert about how families can be all different.

I go over to the stove and stand on my tiptoes to see while I ask, “What are you making, Nana?” and she says, “Oh, lots of things, for the dinner today,” because everyone is going to come back here to have a party after the Real and Actual Wedding.

“The cake looks lovely,” says Mumma, and I see where she is pointing in the shadowy corner of the counter and say, “Ooooh.” The cake has lots of layers, and so much frosting I think I could lick some off and no one would notice (which I _would not do_ because I am not _an animal_ or _a baby_ , even if the frosting looks very delicious and so pretty, made into flowers like my name).

“Thank you, dear.” Nana shuts off the stove and turns all the way around to give me a hug, but then she sees Emmy, who is looking around at the kitchen. Nana puts out her hands and says, “Let me see that sweet girl,” and she picks Emma up, even though she is three now and _really too big for that_.

She does the sign for “grandma” over and over, and Emma copies her and gives a big smile and does signing back, and while they are all busy, I go to start my Big Job.

I have never been in Uncle Bucky’s old bedroom before, only his by himself apartment, but I know where it is, so I go knock on the door.

I hoped that Daddy would answer, but instead one eye peeks out and a voice says, “What’s the password, kid?”

I know it is Mr. Howard Stark, who I am supposed to call Uncle Howard but I Do Not Do That because of the time when I first met him. I was much littler and he came to get Mumma to come help him with something for work, and while we were waiting for Daddy to get home to stay with me, I had An Incidence Of Temper, and instead of being polite about it, Mr. Howard Stark said, “Jeez, Peggy, can’t you get that kid to pipe down?” Which made Mumma say, “If you must be you, I’ll ask you to do it elsewhere,” and she told him to go sit in the kitchen.

“If you must be you, I’ll ask you to do it elsewhere,” I tell him now, trying to sound as much like Mumma as I can, and he laughs and says, “Well, she’s yours, alright,” and I hear Daddy laughing from inside too.

“Is that my helper out there?” Uncle Bucky asks. “Let her in, Howard.”

Inside, it is even more crowded than the rest of the house. Mr. Jim is there, all the way from California, and he winks at me to let me know that he has my movie magazines - everyone knows that it’s better to get them from close to where the movie stars live. Mr. James from England is there, and he tips his hat at me so I curtsy to him. Mr. Jacques has the window open and is holding his cigarette outside, which means that he doesn’t want to get in trouble, so I won’t tell. Mr. Gabe is there, trying to read a book in the corner because he wants to take the test to be a teacher, but Mr. Hat keeps interrupting him. (I made that name for him, because he wanted me to call him Mr. Dum Dum, which is mean and I _did not want to do that_.)

Daddy is standing against the wall looking at everybody and smiling. I know it’s because they’re his friends and he misses them sometimes. Daddy and Uncle Bucky and everyone were soldiers in the big war, and Mumma was their boss. Now they live far away from each other, which is sad, but they like it when they can see each other for special things like this. (The only one Daddy and Uncle Bucky usually get to see is Mr. Howard Stark, which is Too Bad For Them.)

Daddy is all dressed up already, but I know what he looks like in his suit, because he did a fashion show for me and Mumma after he got it fixed by the sewing man. (Emma was already asleep because she is still little.) I told him he looked handsome, but Mumma didn’t say anything, so I said, “Doesn’t Daddy look handsome?” and she said, “Yes, he certainly does,” in a strange kind of voice that I guess was okay because it made Daddy smile. Then Mumma said, “It’s been quite a long time since I saw you in a suit,” and Daddy said, “Well we’ve been a little busy. Don’t worry, I’m sure you won’t be seeing me in it for long,” and Mumma said, “You might be right about that,” and then they said the fashion show was over and it was my bedtime.

“Hi, Rosie Posie,” says Uncle Bucky from where he is sitting on the bed. He is wearing the pants and the shirt from his suit, but not his jacket. 

I do not let _just anybody_ call me Rosie Posie, but Uncle Bucky is one of my favorites so I go over to him and say, “Happy wedding!”

“Thanks, Rosie,” he says with one of those special smiles that looks teensy but actually means that he is very, very happy. “Are you ready to help with your big job?”

I stand up very straight and say, “Yes!” in a Very Loud Voice, which makes Mr. Howard Stark laugh while he is pretending to cough. I will kick him for that later and tell him that He Knows What He Did. (Mumma sometimes says that it’s her job to keep Mr. Howard Stark in line, but it’s nice to help people, even people who are very good at their jobs like Mumma.)

Uncle Bucky reaches over to the little table next to the bed and picks up _the most_ _fancy and beautiful_ box: it is shiny silver and just the right size for me to hold. I reach to grab it, but Uncle Bucky picks it up high and says, “Hold on, now.” He makes his face very serious and says, “Are you absolutely certain you’re ready for this?”

I put my hands on my hips and say, “It was my idea, Uncle Bucky!” which is true. First he asked me if I wanted to do the flowers, but I said I did not want to do that because then I would have to share that job and I wanted my own, and also doing the flowers is boring and all you have to do is walk. So instead I said that I would be the ring girl - the rings are very interesting, but also _very important_ and they will be around for much longer than flowers, _probably forever_.

“Oh, is there an inventor in the room? Am I speaking to the world’s first ring girl?” Uncle Bucky says, pretending, still holding the box too high, which almost makes me stamp my foot and grab for it. But then instead I take a big breath and say very calmly, “Yes, you are, so please give me my special ring carrying box.” And he does.

It feels just perfect in my hands, but I don’t even have a chance to open it before Daddy says, “Rosie, why don’t you take your box over to the other bedroom? I think it’s time for you to get dressed.” And he is right, it is _much too late_ for me to still be in my regular clothes, so I go over and find the right room and knock there.

“Come in, Rose!” Mumma calls, and I open the door just enough for me to come inside.

This room smells very pretty and perfumey, and I take a big breath that makes me sneeze and everyone laughs. They are all in matching dresses, silvery blue with pretty floaty skirts: Mumma and Aunt Becca and Aunt Josie and Miss Violet (that is Aunt Josie’s Best Friend In The World and they also live together; I would like to live with my best friend, who is Bella Solomon, because it would be like having a sleepover all the time, but when I told Daddy that, he just looked a little sad and said, “Someday, if you want, Rosie girl”) and two ladies I don’t know and also Miss Layla, who looks _absolutely extremely beautiful_ in her wedding dress.

I have seen pictures of Mumma at her and Daddy’s wedding, but it is my first time seeing a bride in real life and I say, “Oooh,” out loud and everyone laughs again.

“You can touch it, if you’d like,” says Miss Layla, and I make sure to walk over instead of running because it is crowded and also I am _very mature_. Once I am in front of her, I very carefully feel her sleeve with my fingers: it is so smooth where there is silk and so fancy where there is lace and it is so white that her skin looks very dark and beautiful.

“Do you like it?” she asks.

“I want one just like it when I grow up,” I tell her. Then I whisper to her, “And I looked at the weather in the newspaper, and it is not supposed to be windy, so you will not have to worry about your big skirt flying up and showing everyone your underpants.” Miss Layla looks a little surprised that I am telling her this, but probably also thankful. Weather Checker is also a very important job, so I added it to my other very important jobs. But then thinking about Miss Layla’s underwear makes me forget about weather checking and also about being quiet, because I say, “Are you wearing fancy underpants too, like your dress?” out loud and Mumma covers her face.

I have probably embarrassed everyone. They are probably going to make me go _live in the woods_ so they do not have to be embarrassed of me anymore - and we do not even have a lot of woods near here, so it will probably be far far from here. Maybe I should run away so they cannot send me away first!

But I do not do that. Instead, I take a big breath and make myself say, “Sorry, Miss Layla.”

“That’s alright, Rosie. It’s all family here.” She rubs her chin. “In fact, since I’ll be married to your Uncle Bucky in just a few hours, why don’t you start calling me Aunt Layla?”

“Really?”

She smiles. Her teeth look about as white as her dress! “Really.”

I never got to meet Mumma’s brother, or hers and Daddy’s parents, so I always like when I get more family. Now I have so many aunts and uncles, and it’s almost like I have cousins too because of Aunt Becca’s kids. There are the boys - Jimmy, who is ten and Too Old For Fun, and Billy, who is only four - and then there is Barbara, who everyone has called Baby since she was born and who is almost just my age.

“Where is Baby—I mean Bebe?” Now that she is older, she wants to have a different nickname. She was going to try Bobbi, but I said that Bebe was like Baby in French, which is fancy.

“She’s getting ready at our apartment with her father and her brothers. They’ll meet us there when it’s time.” Aunt Becca checks her watch. “Speaking of which…”

“You’re absolutely right,” says Mumma, and then she helps me put on my _special dress_ , which is silvery blue like everyone else’s but is shorter and more of a kid dress. I am about to mention that I would be able to wear A Grownup Dress when Mumma says, “Hush please, Rose,” and one of the grownup ladies I don’t know says, “That really suits you, Rosie,” and Nana Barnes pokes her head in and says, “It’s time, girls!”

Daddy and Uncle Bucky and their friends are already gone, and now it is time for everyone else to line up to get out of the house. We are going to drive over to the City Hall for the wedding. When I asked why they were not going to have their wedding in a church - there is a church near our house and it feels like _every week_ I see people going to get married inside and I am _never invited_ \- Mumma said it was because Miss Layla—I mean _Aunt_ Layla and Uncle Bucky come from families who go to different kinds of churches from each other, so City Hall was A Compromise. When I asked what _that_ meant, she said, “It’s something your father and I worked hard to learn,” which doesn’t make any sense because City Hall has nothing to do with figuring out not to feed Emma mushy bananas because they make her throw up _everywhere_ **.**

But I knew what she meant about their families, because of the time when Uncle Bucky came home with Aunt Layla and they said that they were going to get married and Nana Barnes got a strange look on her face so Mumma and Daddy told me to go play somewhere else but I stood outside and listened with my Spying Ears. Then I heard Nana Barnes say, “Is this really a good idea?” and “You’re very _different_ from each other...You come from different worlds,” and “Think of what the neighbors will say!” And Uncle Bucky said, “I don’t give a rat’s—” but Aunt Layla said in a very soft and pretty voice, “No, James, it’s fine. I understand that your mother is concerned that a PhD in chemical engineering might not have much to talk about with someone who has a master’s in mechanical. And I thank her for considering that I might have a hard time reconciling myself to marrying someone who’s such a new American citizen: after all, when your grandparents were still first considering getting on the boat over from Ireland, mine had already been ten years out of Babe Ruth.” (Later I asked Mumma and after she said I shouldn’t listen at doors, she told me that it was actually _Beirut_ , but I still like mine better.) “And, of course, there’s the idea of a Boston girl marrying a New York boy, which is cause for a war itself. But I do love you, James, and it’s rather convenient to marry someone who works in the same place, as you can visit the cafeteria together. So I suppose I’ll persevere through all that.”

Everyone was quiet and I held my breath until my eyes got so big I thought they would maybe _pop out of my head_ , but then Nana Barnes said, “Well, with a tongue like that I suppose you’ll fit in with the family,” and Uncle Bucky said, “Is it any wonder I’m marrying her?” Then Daddy said, “You’re damn lucky she even agreed to have you, Buck,” and Uncle Bucky said, “I’m no PhD, but even I know that,” and everyone laughed.

Now Nana is actually friends with Mrs. Adele, who is Aunt Layla’s mother. They are at the back of everybody, telling Aunt Layla and all the ladies to, “Come on now, girls, get into the cars!” There’s a big line of cars on the street. I go in between Aunt Josie and Miss Violet, because Mumma went back to make sure that Daddy took Emma’s other clothes when he took Emma.

I hold my special shiny box that matches my special dress in my lap. Aunt Josie and Miss Violet are talking about how many people are going to come to the party this afternoon. I take sneaky looks to both sides, pretending to be watching out the window: everyone knows that I love to see where my daddy lived when he was my age, even though he says it looks different now. But I am not really doing that, I am checking to see if anyone is paying attention to me. They aren’t.

I open the box just a little bit, but I do not see the rings. So I open it a little more, and then a little more, until it is all the way open, but I still do not see the rings. I turn it over and shake the box, but nothing happens. I scream a long scream inside my head.

I have lost the rings.

Uncle Bucky and Aunt Layla need the rings to get married.

I have ruined the wedding.

“Rose?” Aunt Josie asks me. “Is everything alright?” She is a teacher, so she says she knows a little about Being A Young Person, but she works at high school so she does not know about being _exactly my age_. (Miss Violet is a teacher also, but Aunt Josie teaches English and Miss Violet teaches science and _I think you can tell_.) 

“Everything is fine,” I say, because I know what Mumma would do now, which is be Strong And Brave and _fix everything_. But we are farther and farther away from the house where I must have lost the rings, so I am _just a bit confused_ about how I can fix this.

Baby—I mean _Bebe_ comes over to me right away as our car pulls up and I get out. “Hi Rosie!” she says, and I say, “Hi,” but very quietly. I am thinking about if anyone would notice if I tried to walk back to the house. But I did not go to Girl Scouts like my friend Chrissy Parker and so I _cannot read maps_ and I would probably _get lost forever_. But maybe everyone would _like that to happen_ now that I am the Wedding Ruiner.

“Maybe we can borrow her dress after the wedding and play Bride,” says Bebe, who does not seem to notice _at all_ that I am Having A Crisis. She is still holding her flowers, and I cannot believe that it will be Bebe who is perfect while I have _ruined_ my Very Important Job before the wedding has _even started_.

But it is too late to come up with a plan, because Aunt Layla comes out of her car and starts walking with her family up the steps. I try to hide at the back, but Mumma sees me and says, “Rose, why are you dawdling?” and takes me by the hand.

City Hall is very big and very beautiful. It feels like I am going to meet the president, except if I met the president, he would probably take one look at me and Put Me Right In Jail.

I think about how they would have to make little prison clothes just for me and I hate that so much that I decide that it is time to give up fixing things by myself. “Mumma,” I say, very quiet, so no one else can hear. But I guess it is too quiet, because she doesn’t hear me either. We walk up all the stairs, and at the top I see everyone in a huge group waiting outside a big room. I pull on her hand. “Mumma!”

“What is it, Rose?” For _just one second_ , I think that I will tell her and she will fix everything so everyone will not Hate Me Forever, but then she looks away from me and says, “Oh, there’s your father and your sister.”

Daddy gives us a big smile when we go over to where he’s standing by Uncle Bucky and their friends. “It’s almost time,” he says. I take a big breath and start to talk, but Mumma is looking at Emma and saying, “Oh, she fell asleep again? Honestly, I think simply looking at a car has her closing her eyes. Here, let me take her.” And just because she’s taking sleepy Emma, they have to _kiss,_ which is something Mumma and Daddy do All The Time.

“Some things never change, huh, Cap?” says Mr. Hat, which I don’t understand because Daddy’s name is Grant or sometimes Steve like my name is sometimes Rose and sometimes Rosie. “You spent the whole of the war looking to do that with Carter.”

“Pipe down, you loudmouth,” says Uncle Bucky in a strict voice I’ve only heard once before, but it just makes everyone laugh, and Mr. Jim says, “Guess that hasn’t changed either.”

And then, before I can even say anything, the tall doors are opening and a man who is bald and wearing a special, shiny black dress (I guess he did not want to be left out when everyone was So Fancy) says, “Are you _all_ here for the Barnes-Mansour wedding?” And Nana Barnes says, “Yes, we are. Are you ready for us?”

“I guess that’s our cue, Rose,” says Daddy and he starts to bring me inside with him. He is too busy whispering to Uncle Bucky to hear it when I say his name the first time, and is helping Aunt Layla’s grandma through the door the next time I try to make him pay attention, so it is Perfectly Understandable that what I do is shout very loudly, “DADDY, I HAVE LOST THE RINGS SO I WILL GO RIGHT TO JAIL IF YOU TELL ME TO AND YOU CAN HAVE ALL THE MONEY FROM MY PORKY PIGGY BANK TO BUY NEW ONES.”

Everyone is quiet and staring at me, except for Emma who is still sleeping. I look down at the floor and stay very still. "I'm sorry," I say and hope that Uncle Bucky and Aunt Layla will hear me and know that I am Absolutely Ashamed Of Myself for what I have done.

But then Daddy says in a quiet voice, "You never had the rings, Rose."

That makes me look up at him. "But you gave me the box," I say, and shake it in front of him. Daddy usually has a good memory, but sometimes I have to remind him of things, like that he said that we would "have a discussion" about getting a puppy.

"Yes, but we were going to put the rings in once we had actually gotten here, remember? We talked about it last night." Now that he is mentioning it, I do think I recall something about that part, but I was _very focused_ before bed on all of my important jobs that I might have not been really paying attention to this one tiny detail.

He puts his hand in his pocket and takes out two little velvety boxes. "Here. I'm sorry, Rosie. I should have reminded you."

Uncle Bucky bends next to me. "He's always been like this. Half the time he forgets to tell people the most important things."

"Next time, I'm sure he'll be more clear," says Mumma, who is leaning down to me even while still holding snoozy Emma.

And then Aunt Layla is there too, and she says, "I wasn't planning on there being a next time. In fact, I'd like to get the first and only time started." She takes her father's arm, then says, "If you could get up front, please, James."

After that, everything goes Just Perfectly. Bebe takes her flowers and I have my ring box and we go up to the front with Daddy and Uncle Bucky and Aunt Layla and her friend named Camille, and everyone else sits. The man in the black dress, who is the judge, says big words that sound important, and Uncle Bucky and Aunt Layla both answer him with big smiles, and then I open my box for them. Uncle Bucky has one arm which is metal from Things That Happened To Him In The War, so he wears his ring on the other hand, and he keeps touching it and smiling as the judge says it is time for a kiss.

(I guess Mumma and Daddy are contagious.)

Nana Barnes is crying during the wedding - I ask Daddy about it later, and he says that part of it is happy crying because she loves Uncle Bucky and is glad for his special day, and part of it is sad crying because she misses Uncle Bucky's father and his little sister, who are both dead and are not here to celebrate - but then she wipes her eyes all up and tells everyone to come back to the house for the special party and we all do.

It is even more crowded than it was this morning, and people are standing in almost every single spot, talking and laughing and eating all of my nana's good food. Bebe and I get big pieces of the cake and make a song about the wedding that I decide we will perform for everyone later, but before we can get up and announce ourselves, Uncle Bucky and Aunt Layla come over.

Uncle Bucky is not wearing his jacket anymore, and he has his arm wrapped around Aunt Layla's shoulders. They are both a little sweaty because it is Hot In Here, and also they found a little place to dance and all of their friends brought different records to play.

They hug Bebe first, and that is fair, because Bebe is not the one who was A True Embarrassment at the wedding. But then they hug me too, and say thank you for helping us get married and I look at the floor and say, "I don't remember it that way," and Uncle Bucky says, "Rosie, you made our wedding so special that everyone is going to remember it forever. And look." He shows me his ring and Aunt Layla's which are next to each other because they are holding hands. "You did your job just perfectly. Got the rings right where they needed to be."

"I guess that's true," I say, and start to make little traces on the floor with my shoe, but then stop because Mumma is always telling me, "Don't Scuff, Please, Rose."

"It's absolutely true," Aunt Layla says. "You've been a big help all day long. In fact," she looks over at Uncle Bucky with a tiny, tricky sort of smile on her face. "I don't think I answered your question from this morning."

I try to think back. "What question?"

"After you told me about the weather.” She leans close to me. “You see, I _am_ wearing special underwear today."

"You know," says Uncle Bucky in a loud voice, "I think it's probably time to wrap this party up." But I just laugh at him.

"It's not even dark yet!" I tell him, and he makes a face at me. Then Bebe grabs my hand and says, "Let's go dance," and I run with her to where Mumma and Daddy are dancing to a fast song. They are very good, and I almost start to show off my dancing that I learned from them, but then I decide that this will just be dancing to Unwind After A Long Day.

I was _a_ _particularly excellent helper today_ , after all. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's a long history of precocious girl literary characters and last week's outsider POV thing made me want to try something with one of the kids. So congrats to Rosie for that, and sorry to Barbara "Baby" Proctor but someone had to be sacrificed on the altar of "popular midcentury names sound weird to our modern ears, girls' nicknames subcategory" (for real - growing up I knew TWO older women still nicknamed Cookie, and I have a great-aunt everyone calls Honey even though her real name is Arlene).
> 
> Thanks also to NCSU's Moise A. Khayrallah Center for Lebanese Diaspora Studies for both excellent finding aids and nicely scanned and notated records - archive props to you!


	10. 1969

Drea is the only one of his kids who Steve successfully gets into baseball. Rosie at age six tells him seriously that she has other, more important things to do than watch grownup men get excited about a ball, Em sits patiently through a couple of games that she clearly has no interest in, and Nate, when offered a chance to visit the ballpark for the first time at five years old says, "If you would be happy about it," in such a sweet, guileless way that Steve chokes up and tells him right away to forget about it. (Peggy is only too happy to have him look for someone else to bring - while she knows the rules by now and has watched a few games herself, he thinks that she'd have happily abdicated her seat to any passerby who wanted it. It's fine: she once tried to explain the rules of cricket, and he thinks he might still be comatose.)

But Drea loves it enough for all the rest of them, collecting cards, scanning the sports section each morning as the season approaches, and talking statistics like they're her second language. Nothing much has changed for her since they moved to Maryland: she has a group of boys to trade cards with, her best friends even as she enters junior high, and she's still a solid early choice in a schoolyard or street pickup game.

Steve's too cheap to shell out for Orioles season tickets - they live closer to DC, so getting to Baltimore is less convenient especially for weeknight games, but he's pretty sure that Washington loses their team sometime soon and he doesn't want his daughter getting attached and going through the same heartbreak he did - but he makes sure to take her to a few games a season, just the two of them.

It's a beautiful May Sunday, and the Orioles have just absolutely trounced Kansas City. Steve tosses their hot dog wrappers in the trash on the way out - four of his, one of Drea's - and wraps his arm around her, kissing the top of her baseball cap-covered head as they join the chattering crowd on the way back to their car.

"That was a great game," he says. "I think the O's have a good chance of making the series this year, huh?"

"I'm not very much like other girls, am I?"

It's more momentum than anything that keeps Steve walking. "What do you mean?" he asks carefully, looking down at her. The brim of her cap blocks him from seeing her face, but her shoulders hunch a little under his hand.

"I'm not like Mom," she says. "Or like Emma."

"Well that’s good, because I don't know if I could handle two Emmas. We'd never be able to finish all the desserts." Steve jokes. "And it would be a pretty big coincidence if you were like Mom." Everyone in town is used to the Carters by now, but when they had moved down from New Jersey five years ago, the variation in looks between the children and their lack of similarity to either parent had brought reactions ranging from pity to outright disdain.

"That's not what I mean." Drea starts to walk a little faster, even knowing that her dad can keep up. Her words come out in small, breathless bursts, and Steve aches a little at the bravery it is taking her just to keep speaking them. "It’s just...they know about girl stuff. Mom knows when to wear fancy gloves and pearls and it never looks weird, and Emmy just knows how to _talk_ with other girls. They understand everything without even trying. They like this stuff. The only stuff I like is boy stuff."

"Hey," he says, pulling her to the side of the crowd so he can stop and bend to face her. He peers into the shadow beneath her ball cap, finding her jewel-dark blue eyes. "You're a girl. Anything you like _is_ girl stuff."

She turns away from him. "Yeah, okay."

"I know that Em is a certain kind of girl—" Emma has already requested her own set of mixing bowls for Christmas. Practically the only time she wears pants is in the garden. She used to spend entire afternoons pouring “tea” for a dozen dolls and stuffed animals, signing politely to them as she sipped with an extended pinky. "But your mom put up with a lot during the war, and even now there are plenty of people who say that she isn't doing the things a woman should do. And what about Rosie? She doesn’t exactly fit into a box."

"It's different for me than it is for Rosie." That she says it simply, without a sigh or a teenage eyeroll, makes him sad. Even sadder than that: she's right. As much as he doesn't want it to be, it is different for her than it is for Rose, or Emma, or even Peggy.

"Okay," he says. "You're different than some girls. But that doesn't mean you're doing anything wrong. And I would hate for you to change the way you are or the things you love just because you felt that you had to fit in.” He tries to smile. “Besides, Bucky and the family are coming to visit over the summer and I promised them a good time, which means a trip to the ballpark with the two of us."

This time she does sigh, a tiny hiccup of not being entirely understood or at least of realizing that her father can't fix everything for her. "Yeah," she says again. "Okay."

Steve stands to his full height once again and hugs her against his side for a moment. He and Peggy have changed a lot, but there are some things even more stubborn than they are.

* * *

Tonight was supposed to be a date night with Steve, but there’s been a new FBI head for three, nearly four years now, and Peggy is only just getting around to inviting him and his wife for a collegial dinner engagement. Steve very sweetly said that he doesn't mind any of the time that he gets to spend with her, but she knows that this isn't exactly his idea of an enjoyable evening out. She'll have to remember to make it up to him.

"Which one?" she asks Drea, holding three dress options in front of herself. There's a deep, vivid scarlet number, a classic flared black, and a black and aubergine paneled silk with the tags still on.

Drea considers. "The red. Daddy likes it when you wear red."

"So he does." She strips off her robe and leaves it on the back of the chair as she slides the dress over her head, moving to the mirror to do up the last of the zip and smooth it over her hips. Peggy keeps herself fairly trim, but it's been a while since she wore this particular dress, and one never knows how things might have changed.

In the glass, she glimpses Drea, her black hair tangled and wild around her shoulders as always, her knees tented as she tucks nearly her whole narrow body into the white T-shirt she's wearing: one of Steve's undershirts, no doubt. Drea practically lives in them as it gets warmer. If it were prior to Lula-Cat's escape of the previous summer, the beast would surely be purring on the bed beside her favorite Carter, allowing herself to be petted as she got fur all over Peggy's clean pillowcases.

She is almost fourteen, Peggy realizes with a pang, and not only because her children are growing up even more quickly than she had expected. They will have another year of people plausibly believing her to be a late bloomer, perhaps not even that. She, Steve, Drea and her doctor have an appointment soon for a discussion, and Peggy makes a note to sit down Howard with as well. The little tools he's made for Emma - the vibrating clip for her swimsuit for when they go to the beach, the egg timer with its flashing lights - have been helpful, but the things he could make for Drea might be lifesaving.

As she moves to the vanity and fixes her face, traces on her vividly red lipstick with a practiced hand, thinks for a moment and adds pearl earrings and a simple crystal necklace which Steve gave her for their fifteenth anniversary, she fights to keep both the fear and calculation from her face. Drea already looks melancholy enough.

Peggy sits at the edge of the bed to put on her hose and her pumps. She is just about to get up and take in the final product when Drea says from beside her, "Mom, can you teach me how to put on makeup?"

Peggy pauses for just a moment, then asks, "What brought this on?" She allows only a tiny amount of surprise into her voice. It would be unbelievable otherwise, but the true amount of shock she feels at the question would be insulting, would drive her daughter away.

"Some girls at school are starting to use it. And I—" Her voice falters a bit, then comes back stronger, perhaps too strong, as if she's given herself a stern lecture. "I think I should also know how."

"I think you're a bit young for it, and I'm not sure that 'because everyone else is doing it' is a particularly good reason," says Peggy, continuing over the beginning of Drea's protestations. "But if that's what you truly want, I can certainly give you a lesson or two." She sighs, perhaps a bit theatrically. "Goodness knows I'd have liked for Rosie to ask before she made her first attempts."

It works. Drea laughs a little, remembering Rose's early experiments with cheap drugstore eye makeup and vending machine lip color in a particularly revolting shade of tangerine that gave her a rash.

Peggy stands, smoothing her dress one final time and going over to the closet. She takes out a handbag, and riffles through Steve's tie hanger, selecting a red one which will match her dress and coordinate well with the gray suit she had watched him put on earlier.

"Are you ready?" Drea asks, her voice a bit less dispirited than it had been a few moments earlier, and Peggy nods and moves toward her. Drea spritzes the perfume precisely, two sprays that float in the air for Peggy to walk through. She had always touched on her own scent, a bit at each wrist and at her throat, and just a drop or two on a sachet in her brassiere, but then the children had come along, and now this was a particular tradition whenever one of them helped her get ready.

"Be good for Rose," Peggy says as she leaves the room, and Drea calls back, "If she's good to me."

Rose herself is sitting sprawled out in the doorway of her bedroom, scribbling into a notebook. She is in the midst of a hard-fought campaign for presidency of the upcoming senior class, and lately seems to have decided to plop herself down whenever an idea might catch her. Her legs aren’t long, even at the end of her growth spurt, but she’s positioned herself so they stretch out into the hallway and Peggy steps over them as she passes.

"Don't forget about bedtime," she reminds her eldest, and Rose makes a vague affirmative sound before she places a firm full stop at the end of whatever sentence she is writing and, stretching, looks up at her mother.

"What did you say?"

"Bedtime," Peggy repeats firmly. "Your siblings must adhere to it. As should you. I know that school is coming to an end, but it isn’t here yet."

"Fine," Rosie says with a wave of her hand, and Peggy knows that she'll see the bedroom light snap off just as they turn up the driveway. She starts on her way again (if Rose wants to develop poor sleeping habits, that is her responsibility) but then turns back.

"And be kind to your sister," she tells Rose, dropping her voice a bit. "I think she's having a hard time."

"I can make her a Surprise," Rose suggests, and Peggy shudders, and not just because of Rosie's notoriously poor cooking skills. Drea is the only one of the children with clear memories of her birth parents - she was five when they were killed in a fire while out for their anniversary dinner. One of the things she remembers most clearly is the multitude of casseroles her birth mother made: Hamburger Surprise, Tuna Surprise, Potato Surprise... Peggy has no doubt that they were as ordinary, or perhaps as lackluster, as any example of such a dish, but Drea had built them up in her mind, built them up for Nate, who had no memories of their parents, such that she had spent her childhood requesting various types of Surprises for birthday meals or following an especially good report card.

Steve has turned into a good cook and with Emma at his side they can turn out almost anything, but a Surprise has never been Peggy’s idea of fine cuisine.

"Supper is already being taken care of," Peggy says, adding the _thankfully for you_ only mentally. She can smell Sam's Cornbread in the oven now, can hear the airy silence downstairs, punctuated with little sounds that signify Steve refereeing a fight between Emma and Nate, likely about how much spice to add to the chili. "Just be nice to Drea."

"If she's nice to me," Rosie says, and Peggy refrains from lifting her eyes upward and asking why she had been given two daughters who were so similar and yet refused to realize it.

"Everyone's finished their schoolwork, but make sure that Nate’s book report ends up in his bag. And Emma is trying a new recipe for creamed Brussels sprouts - please tell everyone that they must at least taste it. Don’t simply take the whole pot and bury it in the garbage pail, and certainly don’t try to throw it in the woods the way you did the spinach," Peggy tells her shrewdly, but a new idea seemed to have struck and Rosie is back to her notebook again.

Peggy moves on. Rose has minded her siblings before, and Peggy doesn't want to be late to the dinner and cause an inter-agency incident; Howard would never let her hear the end of it. Besides, she and Steve will have an opportunity to discuss Drea in the car over - there comes a point where even a night away from the children is never truly _away_ from the children.

* * *

Rosie lets Nate and Emma stay up for an extra half hour to cement herself as a Cool Older Sister. Once they're asleep, she knocks on Drea's door, barely waiting to be invited before she enters.

Drea is lying on her back on her bed, tossing a ball up and catching it.

"Be careful it doesn't hit your face," Rose says, hoping that it doesn't come out mean or bossy the way her words sometimes do when she's talking to Drea.

"It’s never happened to me before.” Drea doesn’t take her eyes off the ball. “Just because you’re still scarred from the Wiffle Ball Incident—”

“You said you wouldn’t ever mention that!” Rose comes in and closes the door all the way. “Ugh, just move over.” Drea groans as she sits up against the headboard, but she tucks her legs up to make room and Rosie takes a seat. “Look, I heard you asking Mom about makeup and stuff. Are people giving you trouble at school? Because I’ll give them a talking to if they are.”

“You’re not queen of the high school yet. No one has to just listen to you when you go blab in their face,” says Drea, jutting out her chin, although they both know that when Rosie gives someone a talking to, it not infrequently involves violence. (There had been a question about whether or not she was even allowed to run for the student council based on the number of detentions and suspensions on her record.)

“You’re my sister,” says Rose, setting her own chin. “And if someone’s making problems for you, I’ll take care of it.”

Despite herself, Drea laughs. “You sound like Jimmy Hoffa.”

“Maybe, but Mom would make sure that I covered my tracks better than he did.” Rose lies back across the bed, legs just long enough for her feet to still touch the floor. She turns her face, her hair fanned around her as she looks at Drea, curled up at the head of the bed. “You know I’m serious, right?”

“I know. But it’s not really someone in particular, it’s just...life.”

Rosie sighs. “Yeah.” She puts out her hand, and Drea scooches down to grasp it. “Life’s hard.”

Sarcasm is on the tip of Drea’s tongue - “Tell me more, oh wise one!” - but instead she stays quiet and holds her sister’s hand until their parents return.

* * *

Drea and Steve go with Bucky, Layla, and their kids to watch a blowout Orioles win during their vacation at the end of July - Drea cheers louder than anyone. In August, after they've returned from their own vacation, Peggy sits Drea down at the vanity and walks her a half dozen different beauty products, while Rose comments loudly from the bed. Just before school starts in September, Drea uses her allowance to get a flat iron and gives herself three burns learning how to use it.

The Orioles lose the Series to the Mets, and Drea starts wearing dresses for the first time since she was a child.

It won’t be any help, Steve realizes as she sits down across from him at the breakfast table, settling her skirt self-consciously, sitting up straight and crossing her ankles with awkward politeness, to remind her once more that she doesn’t need to do this. She has a good head on her shoulders, and she’s using it to process everything in the world that tells her otherwise. He remembers what Peggy has said about it, that she’ll come back to herself, she’ll come back to them, when she’s ready. So instead he says, “Hey, kid,” and when she looks up at him, he smiles and tells her, “there’s always next year, you know? Always another shot if we need it.”

And to his relief, she smiles back, the expression familiar, wild-edged and lovely, the same as it’s always been. _Hello in there_ , he thinks.

“Yeah, Dad,” she says. “There’s always next year.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You can be an awesome power couple of a time-traveling supersoldier/stay-at-home dad and a take no prisoners intelligence agency head, but gender roles/expectations are hard to eliminate, ya know?


	11. 1970

Shelby Peterson’s family has been to Disneyland _and_ Disney World, which means she has been on an airplane four whole times. Shelby Peterson has taken pictures with Mickey, Minnie, Pooh Bear, and all seven of the dwarves. Shelby Peterson’s favorite rides is the Rocket Jets, but she likes the Alice in Wonderland teacups too because sometimes they spin so much that her little sister throws up. Shelby Peterson thinks that the Swiss Family Treehouse is so boring that she considered writing to the people at Disney Studios to tell them to come up with something better. Shelby Peterson thinks it’s a real shame that not _everyone_ can experience the most magical place on Earth.

Steve hates Shelby Peterson.

He knows she’s a fifth grader and he knows he’s never met her, but if Nate brings even the specter of her into the house again, Steve’s banning her name.

It’s only because it’s Nate that he hasn’t already. He doesn’t say any of it in a wheedling way, or faux casually while peering up through his eyelashes to see how the information is landing. He doesn’t put it forward as if demanding anything. He drops the comments randomly - after spitting toothpaste into the sink, as he pulls out his math folder in the afternoon, when he asks if the peaches on the backyard tree are still too hard to eat - as if they are always turning over in his mind. His words are always simple and considered, the way Nate is, but there’s a jealousy there, a deep longing that makes Steve’s own brain start working.

“Have you thought about what you want to do with your vacation this year?” he asks Peggy. They have made sure over the past few years that Peggy takes at least two weeks off from carrying too much of the world on her shoulders. “I thought this summer might be a good time to take a trip. Rosie’s going to be starting college in the fall, Drea’s had a pretty tough year, and where have our kids gone in their lives? Brooklyn, up to Howard’s place in Maine, a little time at the beach here and there?”

They stand side by side at the kitchen sink - it’s one of their nights to do the dishes. Steve’s wedding ring (the replacement, which he’s grown quite fond of in its own right) sits on the countertop as he scrubs and rinses a frying pan then hands it to Peggy to dry. She circles the towel over it with an amused expression.

“Is this about Shelby Peterson?” she asks indulgently, slotting the pan into the rack. “Have you finally been convinced to experience Mr. Disney’s dreamland despite the expense?”

Steve finishes the last of the cutlery and hands it off to her, letting the scummy water circle down the drain. “Not exactly,” he says. “But if you can free up some time in August, I thought we might experience something else.”

* * *

They shuffle the kids out of bed at 6 AM, dressed in sweaters and comfortable clothing for the car and carrying their own pillows and blankets. The station wagon was packed the night before, its spacious trunk filled with suitcases, and once everyone is tucked in and already dozing again, they set off.

Peggy squeezes Steve’s hand and leans to take a catnap herself. The sun rising behind them, Steve pulls out of the driveway. As they move easily through quiet, empty streets, Steve looks in the rearview at his sleepy family. When he takes the time to consider it, when he isn’t caught up in the day-to-day routine of it all, there’s a strangely tinged sweetness in looking at them. They are the loves of a life he nearly didn’t have, and he is so grateful that he has had the opportunity to know them and be loved by them, for them to know and love each other.

He smiles to himself: he has no idea why Peggy thought this would be a rough trip.

* * *

By 9 AM everyone is up again and clamoring for breakfast.

By 10, they’re returning to the car following a nasty fight in the diner between Rose and Drea over whether they should both get pancakes or if one of them should get French toast (Rose: “It makes sense to have one of each! Then we can trade, a taste for a taste.” Drea: “You wouldn’t stop at just a taste! You’d probably eat all of yours and half of mine!”).

By 11, everyone is stewing in the aftermath of the argument between Nate and Drea as they’d returned to the car (Drea: “You can’t have that seat - you know we’re supposed to trade, plus I had dibs on that one and you know I get nauseous.” Nate: “The first part of the ride was short! Trades only count when it’s been hours. And we all know you’re faking because you just don’t like the back.”) and another between - surprisingly - Rose and Emma because Rosie refused to root around under the seats for Em’s sky blue colored pencil (Emma: “But you have the longest arms! They’re _so long_ , it will be easy for you.” Rose: “I’m sorry, my weird long arms are _busy_.”)

Steve refuses to look over at Peggy, even as they stop for bathrooms, gas, and lunch around 1.

* * *

They divide into a kids’ room and a parents’ room at the motel in Indianapolis that night. Through the wall, Steve can hear the four of them bickering about who should have to share beds with who.

“I have no idea whether or not Rosie’s snoring is the equivalent of Nate’s kicking, but if they don’t go to sleep soon I don’t know that it will matter,” Peggy mumbles.

“If they’re tired out, it might make things easier tomorrow,” Steve suggests.

“I’m not certain that you’re in a place to comment,” she tells him, and rolls over to go to sleep.

* * *

Peggy takes the first driving shift the next morning, outfitting herself with sunglasses and a determined expression. They’re supposed to make it to Missouri by tonight.

“You look great today,” Steve tries about ten minutes down the highway, but Peggy just raises a waspish eyebrow at him and puts her foot to the gas. He sighs and tries to find a comfortable way to stretch his legs as he takes out his book.

The kids are following his example in the back, having each apparently elected to give the silent treatment to the rest. He isn’t sure how effective it is when they’re all doing it, but at least it’s quiet. Quiet enough that with the road whizzing beneath them and the scenery blurring outside, Steve actually falls asleep.

When he wakes up, Peggy is saying sternly, “No dirty words, Rose,” and Rosie is replying back, “I just said that we should look for signs that have the letters F and U in them! We’ve gone through the whole alphabet already, we have to move on to combinations. It’s just logic.”

“I can do without that logic,” Steve tells her, straightening in his seat and clearing his throat. “Your mother’s right, pick something else.”

“Hello, again,” Peggy says to him as he scrubs his fingers over his eyes to clear them. Behind them, the kids are reminding each other of the rules for Twenty Questions.

“Hey.” He smiles over at her. “I didn’t think I’d slept that long. Are these our same kids from this morning?”

“They are, they’ve simply remembered that they actually like one another.”

“Mom, Emma says that Drea’s pushing on the back of her seat!”

“That’s what happens when I’m all the way back here! My legs need somewhere to go.”

“Well, they like each other most of the time,” Steve says, and points to an awning beside the road proclaiming _Dolly’s_ , the smaller print below reading _Hamburgers, Floats, Fries_. “And they’ll probably like each other more after lunch.”

* * *

Their motel that night has a pool, and the fact that none of the kids beg for a swim before bed should probably be a tipoff that something is up. Steve is still awake and reading at 11 when there’s a splash outside the window. He brushes back the curtain and stretches up as much as he can from his position sitting up against the wall. Rosie and Drea have already jumped in, and Nate is climbing down the ladder. Emma seems content to simply dangle her feet, at least for now.

“Are you going to tell them off?” Peggy mumbles into his shirt from where she’s dozing on his shoulder.

“Nah.” Steve closes his book and puts it on the bedside table. He leans over and rests his face into Peggy’s hair for a moment. “Hey, Peg,” he finally says, kissing the top of her head with his eyes closed. “You brought a swimsuit too, didn’t you?”

The night manager comes out at half past midnight to grumble at them that the pool’s closed, and when they go to check out, a charge has been added to their bill for a noise violation. Steve’s about ready to argue that he isn’t paying for any made up fine, but then he watches Nate and Emma guarding the luggage in the corner, interrupting each other with eagerness as they recall the underwater somersault contest they had with Peggy the night before.

He pays the charge.

* * *

They drive past a sign advertising a local square dance in one of towns near the border of Oklahoma, and even though they’re meant to just be driving through, the kids want to see it badly enough that they while away the rest of the day and put together the most appropriate outfits they can find from what remains in their suitcases.

It’s too intimidating for the kids to actually participate. Even Rose, who is usually difficult to embarrass, doesn’t attempt a venture into the fast paced synchronicity in front of her. But they enjoy themselves anyway, clapping along to the beat that echoes from the huge tent which has been set up, trying to translate the unfamiliar language of the dance for Emma, and appreciating the energy of the caller, a grinning, red-faced man whose enthusiasm only increases as the evening goes on, until he’s ending each number with a bellowed “Yeehaw, it’s done!”

For the rest of the trip, whenever something is completed - a meal or a book, the drive through another state - it will be inevitably and solemnly announced, “Yeehaw, it’s done.”

* * *

The plan had been to have arrived in time to celebrate Nate’s birthday, but the stop in Oklahoma puts them a bit off. They end up in a joint called Elmer’s for his celebratory dinner, which Steve doesn’t think looks particularly promising, until he meets Myra, the brains behind the operation.

She doesn’t even let them order, just brings out family sized dishes of lasagna and garlic bread and some kind of broccoli dish that all the kids actually eat. When they mention that it’s Nate’s birthday, she nods solemnly and asks how old he is. The cake, topped with eleven candles plus one to grow on, arrives at the end of the meal, so enormous that Myra has to balance it on both arms.

“How did you know what kind I wanted?” Nate asks her, wide-eyed, as they get ready to go. “No one _ever_ guesses that I like white frosting but chocolate cake inside.”

Myra taps the side of her nose. “Restaurant owner secret.”

(Emma won’t leave until Myra’s given up her lasagna recipe, even though she and Steve have been perfecting their own for years.)

* * *

“If we’re just going to find a place for the night,” Rosie asks slyly as they return to the car, “why don’t I drive?”

“No,” Steve says firmly, only to find himself echoed by everyone else. Rose is a maniac driver. He’d tried to give her a couple of lessons but couldn’t concentrate on advice when he was consistently formulating strategies for evasive maneuvers - he was certainly getting older, but he could _probably_ still get the two of them out if it came to it. It is common family wisdom that she’d only been licensed to drive because the examiner had interpreted her handling of the test course as a direct threat on his life.

Keeping a tight grip on the keys, Steve says, “I’m actually in the mood to drive a little more. You all go to sleep. I’ll wake you up when I find somewhere to stop.”

* * *

He turns off of I-40 around 5 AM. The sun is just beginning to trickle up the horizon. He leans over and runs his fingers over Peggy’s cheek.

“Are we there?” she asks, her voice soft and sleepy. She blinks a few times, slow, groggy, barely opening her eyes, and stretches a bit. “Have you accomplished your latest bullheaded idea?”

“Almost. Thanks for agreeing to come with me.”

“I always will,” she says. “You know that.”

He drives the rest of the way with one hand on the wheel, the other hand holding hers.

* * *

They don’t quite make it before sunrise, but that’s alright. There isn’t anyone much there: it’s chilly, a Monday morning. The kids bundle themselves up in their blankets as they stumble from the car. They are still in their clothes from dinner last night.

They stand together on the rim of the Canyon, looking out.

“This is it,” Steve signs when no one says anything first. He wonders if they’re regretting letting themselves get dragged all the way across the country. Maybe this isn’t enough for them the way he had thought it would be.

Then Drea says, “The world is so big.” For once she does not stretch the sign to exaggeration; it is held against her chest in wonder, a whisper. She looks up at him. “Dad, did you know the world is so big?”

He smiles down at her. “I had a bit of an idea.”

* * *

They start to drive back at night after two days at and around the Grand Canyon. It’s the only way Mom is going to get back in time for her to start work again, and everyone still has to go back-to-school shopping.

“At least you let us prepare this time,” Rosie grumps as they climb into the car. “No one likes sleeping in their jeans, Dad.”

Dad just kisses the top of her head and says, “I’ll keep that in mind.”

Nate, like all his siblings, falls asleep pretty easily on car rides. But he wakes up a little while later and isn’t sure why. It’s really dark out, even darker than at home, and the stars look pretty from where his head is leaning by the window. Mom and Dad are talking softly up front. He likes when they do that. It makes him feel safe.

“I’ve been thinking,” Mom says. “It seems to me that once the cost of the various food and lodgings, the gas and souvenirs and all the rest have been tallied up, a trip to Orlando might have been more cost effective.”

“Maybe,” says Dad. “But wasn’t this worth it?”

“Hmm,” says Mom in that smiling way she does when Dad makes a good point. “I suppose it was.”

Nate remembers doing handclaps across the car seat with Emma until his palms were sore and they declared themselves world champions, making Rosie laugh until she’d almost peed in the pool, trying to remember the square dance steps with Drea even though he was too short and she was too tall and they kept tripping over each other. He remembers his birthday cake. He remembers Mom leaning over to Dad that first day at the Canyon and asking very quietly, “You really never saw it before? In all that time?” and the way he’d replied, “No. I guess I was waiting to see it with all of you,” and how Nate had felt all lit up inside from hearing that.

 _Worth it_ , Nate thinks drowsily, and closes his eyes again as Dad drives them steadily through the dark.

He’ll have plenty of stories of his own to tell Shelby Peterson when sixth grade starts.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>   * This is also my "free choice" day fic for Steggy Week.
>   * You can tell that Shelby Peterson's a monster because she hates the Swiss Family Treehouse, an objectively awesome attraction.
>   * I knew pretty quickly after I'd laid out the kid situation for this 'verse that I wanted to do a road trip. I'm from a big family, and I have so many memories of being trapped uncomfortably in the car for hours (eventually with 3 siblings who are 6 feet tall or close to it), but also of inside jokes or strange occurrences that become family legend - it's something of a distillation of how special and how annoying it can be to be part of a family.
>   * I also definitely wanted Steve to be a real dad about deciding that his kids needed to take in the wonders of the country or whatever.
>   * Topics that I now have Opinions on based on my "research" for this chapter: 1960s station wagons, early Disney character costumes, square dancing
>   * This wasn't where I meant to end this story, but it also feels like a good stopping place? I'm running a little low on chapter ideas and I'm not sure if people are still reading. I don't know, let me know or prompt me or something.
> 



	12. 1968

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No actual domestic violence, but there's a lot of borderline verbal abuse/talking down to a young kid in this one, if you want to avoid it.

Ricky’s dad has told him more than once to stay away from “those Carters” and usually he listens. Even though Nate Carter most often has _excellent_ lunches, and sometimes he shares. Even though Ricky liked it when Mrs. Hawkins saw Nate handing in his biography report about Harriet Tubman and told him, “Nathaniel, this report is supposed to be about _great American heroes_ ,” and Nate just replied, “Yes,” and sat back down. Even though Ricky thinks that every once in a while he’d also enjoy just sitting on the side of the field and drawing or reading a comic book instead of needing to play football or baseball all the time because his dad always asks at dinner how many points he scored.

Once or twice he saw kids from their class bullying Nate, pushing him around or knocking his books out of his arms. Ricky’s never done that sort of thing, but he watched it. Usually they’d leave Nate alone after a few minutes when he’d say something quiet like, “I’d stop that if I were you,” and it confused them because he wasn’t crying or trying to hit back. But Ricky’s also seen Nate jam his elbow into big Kenny Keefer’s stomach - it didn’t even look hard, but Kenny fell onto the ground gasping for air.

Nate got left alone after that.

He’s friends with some of the girls and a particular few of the boys. Ricky thinks of those guys he spends time with as the Nice Boys. (Ricky’s dad would have a different name for them, so he’s just friends with the Boys.) The Nice Boys don’t yell. At lunchtime they eat and talk and joke with each other - no one throws food at anyone else, or does impressions of other kids that are supposed to be silly but Ricky sometimes thinks are pretty mean.

Once or twice, Ricky’s thought of what it would be like to sit with the Nice Boys, but his brother Tim might mention it to their dad. Tim is only in first grade - too young to know better.

Ricky’s only even talked to Nate once or twice, maybe a “hey” in the hallway or a question about the homework, and he isn’t planning on doing it today. But Ricky’s parents forgot that today was a half day, early dismissal for the Christmas vacation. Tim’s at home with a cold and Ricky doesn’t want to have to go to the office and call his mom, make her bundle a sick little kid into the car and drive over to the school, doesn’t want to have to sit in a chair beside the office door with his backpack at his feet while people walk by and realize that he’s been forgotten.

So instead he climbs onto the bus and tells the monitor that his mom said that he should take that instead. There must be a stop near his house. He’ll get off there and walk home, which his mom’ll like once he gets there because he’ll have taken care of this for her.

It’s a great plan, except that they drive away from the school and through town in a way that gets Ricky all turned around. It’s sort of cold and dark from the clouds that have been covering the sky all day, and nothing looks familiar. He holds his bag against his chest and tries to look relaxed as more and more of his friends get off the bus. He tries to think of a new plan.

“You should come with me.” Nate Carter pokes his head over the top of the seat in front of him. “My stop’s the last one. Get off with me and my dad will take you home.”

Ricky doesn’t even think to be embarrassed that Nate noticed that he was lost, that he hadn’t been able to get himself where he needed to go. He’s just grateful. “Thanks,” he tells Nate.

They get off at the very edge of town and Nate leads the way up a long driveway surrounded by trees and bushes and stuff. His house, when they finally get there, is big and blueish-grayish and kind of old fashioned looking, but probably the fanciest house Ricky’s ever seen in real life. Nate doesn’t even seem to notice. He checks the mailbox (nothing; Nate makes a “hmph” sound), turns the big shiny doorknob, and walks in, taking off his shoes and dropping his bag on the floor. Ricky copies him, trying to seem as if he’s comfortable here even though he really feels the way he does in the library, or when they went on a class trip to the museum, like someone’s going to come over and tell him he’s walking too loud.

“My dad’s probably in the kitchen,” says Nate, sliding a little on the shiny wooden floors. They pass by a few different rooms on the way which look pretty interesting at a glance, but Ricky keeps his head down and his hands in his pockets. He doesn’t want any of the Carters to think he’s being sneaky or nosy. If his dad somehow finds out about this, he wants it to seem as if this was just business, just about a ride and nothing else.

Nate’s dad isn’t in the kitchen when they get there, but a girl with curly blond hair who looks nothing like Nate is sitting at the table, reading a book and finishing off a piece of apple. The table is covered with food - a plate of carrot and celery sticks, one of sliced apples and oranges, a bunch of sandwiches cut into triangles, a pitcher of juice - which obviously can’t all be for this one girl.

Ricky holds his breath to try to stop his stomach from grumbling. They were let out of school before lunch.

The girl at the table - Nate’s sister? - glances up at them. She stares at Ricky for an extra beat, then looks over at Nate and, keeping one hand on the page, starts moving the other around in the air, fast, like code or a baseball catcher showing signals, not like she’s just making something up.

Ricky looks over at Nate to see if she’s insulting them somehow, only to see Nate moving _his_ hands too, both of them. He turns to Ricky.

“This is Emma. She says our dad is doing laundry, but he’ll come upstairs in a minute.”

“Oh. Okay.” Ricky doesn’t know if he should wave, or if he can even look at Emma without seeming rude. He doesn’t want to look at the table because it reminds him of how he’d have sandwiches of his own if he’d just gotten home. He stares down at the floor.

“You can come sit,” Nate says comfortably, taking a seat next to Emma and pointing to another chair for Ricky, who complies. Emma gets up, though, pushing her own chair in. She goes over to the counter and takes a fresh cookie off a tray there, wrapping it in a napkin. Nate reaches up to pat her shoulder as she goes past and when she looks at him, he moves his hands at her again. Emma does it back, sticking her tongue out at the end and then biting smugly into her cookie as she leaves the room.

“I’m telling you, she’s going to get in trouble for leaving crumbs in the house,” Nate says, shaking his head even though he sounds like he finds it a little funny.

“Is that what you said to her?”

“Yeah. And she said that when you bake the cookies you can eat them wherever you want, but I don’t think Mom and Dad will see it that way. We have _rules_ here.”

“Um.” Ricky looks down at his lap, then back at Nate. “Um, what was the stuff you were doing with your hands?”

“Sign language,” Nate says offhandedly, pulling the plate of sandwiches toward him to examine the different kinds. “Emma’s Deaf, so she only uses ASL.”

“How come she doesn’t talk?”

Nate shrugs. “How come you don’t sign?” He makes a face at a tuna sandwich, then turns the plate around so he can grab a chicken salad one instead.

“I hope you offered your guest some lunch, too.”

Ricky turns around to see a man standing in the kitchen doorway carrying a basket of laundry in his arms. The man comes in and says, “Hey, kid,” shifting the basket over so he can give Nate a little hug around his shoulders as he passes. He sets the basket down on Emma’s empty chair, then walks over and puts out a hand for Ricky to shake.

“I’m Grant Carter, Nate’s dad,” he says with a smile. Ricky tries not to stare at him.

One time Ricky’s mom hurt her leg and so she asked his dad to do the grocery shopping, and when the cabinets were pretty much empty, he finally did. When he came home, he’d said right away, “Guess who I saw? That weirdo Grant Carter. Apparently he’s over at Hillyard’s all the time while his wife’s out there like a bigshot. Yeah, he was just moseying through the aisles with his _beard_ and his _little basket_ over his arm, joking around with the meat guy and the checkout girl...What a—” And then he’d used a word that made Ricky’s mom say, “ _Earl_ , not in front of the kids!” (Ricky had been worried that his dad would start talking about how he can say anything he wants in his own house, but instead he just shook his head, put the bags down on the kitchen table, and said, “Jenny, can you take care of this stuff? I’m bushed, and you’re better at organizing it anyway.”)

So that’s what Ricky knows about Grant Carter.

“This is Ricky,” Nate fills in while Ricky does a quick handshake and lets go. “He needs a ride home.”

“Nice to meet you, Ricky. I’m happy to give you a ride.” He looks at Nate, who’s halfway through his sandwich, and says, “Get a plate, please,” and then looks back at Ricky. “Does your mom know that you came over here?”

“It was pretty sudden…” Ricky tries quietly, and Grant Carter says, “Sure. Well, if you know your number, why don’t you give a call so she won’t get worried? And if she says it’s alright, you can stay for lunch before I drive you over. There’s plenty.”

Ricky glances at the phone hanging on the wall. It’s across the kitchen, sure, but everyone will still be able to hear him, to hear him mumble to his mom that she’d forgotten about him, that he’d gotten himself into a situation.

“You know,” says Mr. Carter, “this phone’s actually been acting up. The one in the family room will probably be better.”

The family room has books all along the walls. There are stacks of board games on the shelves, and a million photos in different sized frames: Nate’s dad in a suit standing next to a woman Ricky assumes is Nate’s mom in a wedding dress, looking at each other instead of the camera, a group of grinning kids in bathing suits next to a giant sandcastle (Ricky can pick out Nate and Emma). There’s a thick carpet on the floor. Ricky curls his toes in it while he dials his mom. As soon as she hears his voice, she says, “Oh gosh, honey, today was an early day, wasn’t it?” He tells her that it’s okay, he came home on the bus with Nate Carter, whose dad offered to bring him home after they’ve eaten.

“Maybe I should come pick you up now. I don’t know if your father would like you being over there for any longer than you have to,” says his mom, considering. Ricky thinks about how Nate’s kitchen smells like cookies plus fresh laundry now, and how the chicken salad had celery and golden raisins and little chopped up nuts, the way they never have it at home because he’s the only one who likes it. He stays quiet until she adds, “Well, but, it’s probably rude to interrupt his lunch when he’s been nice enough to offer…” Her tone turns curious, her voice softer, like a secret. “What does their house look like? Describe it all for me.” He knows she wants to be able to tell everything to her sister Cheryl, who lives two blocks over from them.

“I’ll tell you about it later,” he says quickly. He doesn’t really want Mom and Aunt Cheryl wondering to each other what it means that the Carters own both Slap Stick and Hands Down, or frowning as they think about all the writers with foreign sounding names on the shelves. “I have to go eat, Mom.”

Back in the kitchen, Mr. Carter has taken the laundry basket away and set out a plate for himself and one for Ricky too. The chicken salad, when he tastes it, is just as good as he’d hoped.

Nate, chomping through carrots, talks about school, and his dad asks questions: how does Nate feel after the geography quiz, does he have enough books to read over the vacation or should they go to the library? Every so often he’ll turn to Ricky and ask him something too, and Ricky ends up talking more than he means to. He tells them about how he’s read _The Phantom Tollbooth_ three times but the school librarian had let him borrow _From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler_ last year and he loved that too. He talks about his little brother Tim and how he knows absolutely everything space and wants to go there one day. He’s just starting to tell them about his top favorite Orioles players when the front door opens and then slams shut.

“You and Drea will have a lot to talk about,” Nate says, muffled into his cup of juice.

“—how it’s even allowed!”

Two new girls walk in. They are around the same height, although Ricky recognizes one - the skinny girl who is dressed in jeans and a plain brown shirt and has Nate’s same dark hair, the girl he’d see sometimes touching Nate’s hand when their classes passed in the hallway before she moved up to the junior high school - and not the other, who has light brown hair and big glasses and is wearing a shirt so extremely patterned it almost seems to come with a soundtrack.

“What happened?” Mr. Carter asks, pushing out a chair with his foot. The skinny girl, the one who must be Nate’s real sister, collapses into it and rests her head on her folded arms.

“Her teachers gave her vacation homework and she’s been whining about it all the way home.” The other girl goes to the cabinet for a couple more plates before taking a seat too, pulling the sandwiches toward herself. “Drea, I think you’re being a little dramatic.”

Nate makes a little sound that Ricky can definitely hear is a laugh/snort, but when the girl with the glasses glares at him, he pretends he was coughing.

“I seem to remember someone last year calling homework during vacation ‘an Eighth Amendment loophole that will and must one day be closed,’” says Mr. Carter, raising an eyebrow as he finishes off his sandwich.

Drea lifts up her head, shaking back her hair. “ _Rose_ doesn’t have homework this year, so I guess she’s not bringing a Constitutional challenge anymore.”

“There isn’t any turkey?” says Rose, clearly pretending not to hear them as she devotes all her concentration to looking over the food options.

“If you’d like a turkey sandwich, everything you need is in the fridge,” says Mr. Carter, adding a couple of apple slices to his own plate and biting into one calmly. Rose sighs.

“Tuna’s fine.”

The front door opens then closes again, and Ricky wonders if there’s going to be another secret sibling wandering through, but Emma skids back in on stocking feet instead, waving a pile of mail, on top of which is a magazine. Ricky manages to read the banner text across the front: Course Catalog, Spring 1969, University of Maryland

Rose drops her tuna sandwich right back on the plate as she pushes back her chair to grab for it. Emma holds it close to her belly and Rose starts to tickle her so that she lets out wheezing laughter and drops to the floor, curling up to keep hold of the mail.

Mr. Carter sighs and stands, tugging the prize out from between them as he does more of the sign language with one of his hands.

Nate laughs and Ricky must look confused because he tells him, “Dad says that since he gets to pick three classes and we only get to pick one, he should get to look first because he needs more time. And also that it’s addressed to him.”

Emma and Rose stand up together, shadowing Mr. Carter as he sits back at the round table. Emma taps his shoulder, signing again, and then Rose does some too.

“What are they saying now?” Ricky asks, leaning over to Nate. He puts down his sandwich because he hasn’t taken a bite in five minutes, just watching all the Carters talking to each other, and it’s getting soggy from being squished between his hands.

“Emma says that because we only get one big chance, we should be allowed to see it first so we can make sure to pick right. And Rosie says that he’s the parent, so he needs to be a role model for sharing and...um, flexibility.” Nate flaps a hand to get their attention and adds something himself, then turns to Ricky and translates: “Also honesty, because when he started college, Dad promised we’d get to pick one class a semester for him and he shouldn’t go back on his word.”

Drea’s hands start moving too, and Mr. Carter rolls his eyes and says, signing along with the words, though not as quickly, “I’m aware that there’s only another three semesters before I graduate, which is why I want to make sure that my credits are all straightened out. Shouldn’t take longer to get through school than I already have.” But he looks around at his kids, their crossed arms and begging faces, and sighs again. He drops the course listing on the table and sweeps his arm over it. “Look at it calmly, please.”

Rose reaches over his shoulder, picks it up, and flips it open with a practiced hand. She starts reading aloud while Drea does what Ricky assumes is a translation because Emma is watching her hands. “Okay. American Studies. AMST 127: Culture and Arts in the Americas—”

Emma already has her thumb turned down; Ricky might not know sign language but he understands that one. But before he can hear exactly what the class is about, there’s a knocking on the door.

Ricky freezes even as Mr. Carter stands to answer it. He recognizes that knock.

“Can I help you?”

Ricky makes himself stand up in the space between Mr. Carter’s polite voice and his dad saying roughly, “I’ll take my boy back now, thanks, Carter.”

“You must be Ricky’s father. We were just finishing up with lunch—”

“As if I can’t feed my own kid at home. Even kids who make stupid mistakes get to eat.” Ricky’s dad snorts. It makes Ricky want to sneak back into the kitchen, to tuck himself between Rose, who has her eyes narrowed behind her glasses, and Nate, who has stood up from his chair too, looking serious. But he has already edged into the hallway and his dad spots him and crooks a finger. “There you are. Time to go.” He stares at Ricky the whole time as he walks down the hall. “Your mom told me about all the screw-ups today. Good thing I got home from work early.”

Ricky shoves his feet into his Keds. The backs fold against his heels. He ties them as quickly as he can, no time for double knots, even though that means that the laces might slip loose, which will make his dad say, “ _Jesus_ , fourth grade on my tax dollars and can’t even tie his own shoes.”

“Thanks for lunch,” he mutters to Mr. Carter as he walks toward where his dad stands in the doorway. Nate has come down the hall too, tucked watchfully against his father’s side. Ricky adds, not looking him in the face, “See you at school.”

“‘See you at school,’” says Ricky’s dad in a mocking little voice. “Yeah, that had better be all you do. No more visits to this freak show. Come on.” His hand comes out, and Ricky tenses his shoulders without meaning to. He can nearly feel the clawed fingers gripping into his upper arm, steering him back toward their car and their house and their life.

Mr. Carter’s hand catches his dad’s before it can land.

“Think twice,” he says quietly. “About saying things like that in front of my son, but especially about doing it in front of yours.”

Ricky’s dad is a big man. It’s a fact, his size, and he makes it obvious in the way he moves through the world. His chest is always pushed out. He is always ready to tower over someone who moves in front of him in line, to shove through a crowd, to bulldoze and bellow his way to what he wants.

When he’d heard that first story about Mr. Carter, Ricky had pictured someone skinny or old, and Mr. Carter doesn’t exactly look like a big person. He is not the type who shoves through crowds. He is dressed in a green and tan sweater with a tan shirt collar coming over the top and the sleeves rolled up, and a pair of jeans. Ricky’s father would never wear something like that.

Mr. Carter’s face stays absolutely still as he squeezes Ricky’s father’s wrist. It wouldn’t even be obvious that it was happening, except that Ricky’s dad’s eyes go wide. He tries to pull away. He doesn’t manage it until Mr. Carter releases him.

He stumbles a couple of steps and then recovers, backing his way off the porch. “Come on,” he says again, gruffly, but it is not commanding the way it had been. Ricky lets himself give a little wave to the two Carters standing in the doorway, Mr. Carter’s hand resting on Nate’s shoulder, before he follows his father to the car.

* * *

Three days after New Year’s, Ricky goes outside of the school after the last bell to wait for his mom to pick him up. Nate passes by on his way to the bus.

“Here,” he says in a low voice, and hands over two pieces of paper. “My phone number’s there, in case you wanted it. And my dad drew you this.”

Ricky stuffs the picture into his backpack just in time. He keeps thinking about it but doesn’t risk taking it out until he is doing his homework alone in his bedroom later that afternoon.

Mr. Carter has drawn him precisely, but he stares at the image and almost doesn’t recognize himself. The illustrated face is just barely laughing, the hands cupped in front as if holding something. He knows that it’s him describing Claudia and Jamie taking the coins from the fountain.

He forgets, sometimes, that he has that inside of him. It is hard to remember beneath the blare of his father’s voice saying that he wasn’t looking to raise some _reader_.

He almost puts the picture beneath his pillow but he doesn’t want to crush it. He slides it into the drawer of his desk instead. As he falls asleep, he looks over at the spot as if he can see that image of himself through the wood, in the dark.

* * *

The next week, Ricky takes his time standing in the lunch line. His legs shake a little and he has to force himself to keep walking past his usual table. Even if Tim doesn’t say anything, Carl Tyler’s dad bowls with Ricky’s, and Kenny Keefer’s goes for beers with him.

He stops next to Nate and the Nice Boys anyway.

“Can I—” he starts, but before he can finish, Nate is giving him a smile, pointing to an open chair.

“Course,” he says. “Take a seat.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My triumphant return to this fic and it's basically the chapter 8 redux. And I know that I've been a bit stuck in this time period, but I can't get past my love showing Good Dad Steve or of getting to write Mr. Carter a bunch of times. I do have something a little different in mind for next week - we'll see how it goes.
> 
> Couldn't find much on school vacation schedules for the 1960s and 70s, so you'll just have to go along with the potential fiction of a half-day.
> 
> The University of Maryland has _extremely helpfully_ digitized basically all the College Park course catalogs, which is how I know that the classes for 1969 were in a combined 1968-1970 booklet, making it unlikely that Steve would have received a class listing for the Spring 69 semester. Pretend I didn't give you that information.


	13. 1995

Fury has seen Peggy Carter twice: once at a podium during her speech at his SHIELD induction, and then again, from a distance and surrounded by higher-ups, when she had toured the new LA headquarters back in ‘86. He’d been impressed by her - she’d been exactly what he’d expected - but also had no doubt she wouldn’t be able to identify him in a lineup of two. She might not know all about his last few batshit days or be clued in on the alien species of it all, but Peggy Carter is so far above his pay grade that he couldn’t reach her if he climbed back into the spaceship he’d just gotten off of.

So it’s a bit of a surprise when she shows up at the Rambeau house.

“There’s a car coming up the road,” Monica shouts from over at the front window where she’s showing Talos’s daughter how to play Guess Who?, and Fury dries his hands on a dishtowel and follows Carol and Maria out onto the porch. The car stops in the driveway. Fury unlatches his gun holster and keeps a hand on it. A man steps out of the driver’s side; hard to see much about him in the dim light. He goes around to the other side of the car and opens the door for the woman sitting there. He bends his head close, as if speaking to her for a moment, then steps back as she exits the car to join him. She threads her arm through his and they walk together across the lawn. As they get closer to the porch light, Fury evaluates them more closely: the man is still unfamiliar, older but straight-backed, with hair going silver and some gentle wrinkles around the eyes and mouth, and the woman is Peggy Carter.

Oh, she’s not in one of her classic suits, dressed instead in gray slacks and a pink sweater (someone, his mother or Coulson or _someone_ , would tell him that it’s a particular shade like salmon or peach or daiquiri or whatever the hell, but it looks pink to him) and appearing somehow fresh despite the southern heat. Her hair is iron colored by now and cut just below her chin, her gaze firm as the one in the portrait that hangs in the hallway outside Fury’s office. Until the man makes some remark in her ear and then she looks at him with fond exasperation that she doesn’t turn off until they’ve neared the base of the porch.

“Agent Fury,” she says, addressing him. He pulls his gun and raises it at her, even though it seems a little pointless with Carol and her laser hands beside him. Peggy Carter, or what looks like her, just raises a calm brow, seeming a bit amused. “I know you’ve had a trying time, but this really is quite the disheartening welcome.”

“Sorry to disappoint,” Fury says, keeping his service weapon steady even as he tries to pretend that his eye isn’t itching like hell, “but I think our southern hospitality’s a bit tapped out today.”

“If they’re Skrulls, I think we actually just agreed to extra hospitality,” Maria points out.

Carol, tilting her head, asks, “So, are you Skrulls?”

The couple trades a glance. “No, mostly regular human,” says the man.

“Sorry if I don’t entirely believe you,” says Fury, knowing he sounds not particularly sorry at all. Hard to remember that about five minutes ago he was using a scrub brush to show off his knowledge of sixties Motown. “Maybe you’re good Skrulls who have reason not to want to show it off, maybe you’re the bad cousins we haven’t met, maybe you’re some other damn breed of aliens, but after the things I’ve learned, I think it’s reasonable to be a little wary about making new friends. Particularly those who didn’t start off asking, ‘What the hell’s a Skrull?’” 

“Before you say anything you can’t take back, who exactly is this supposed to be that you’re threatening to shoot?” Carol asks him.

“Well, first, I think at this point you’ve been standing next to me long enough that _we’re_ threatening to shoot her, or worse, in your case. Second, I’m not threatening anyone, just taking reasonable precautions. And third, this may or may not be Peggy Carter, the head of my organization—”

“Well, just barely,” Carter says. “The retirement party is scheduled for sometime soon.”

“She’s been saying that for years,” the man inserts. “And I have the feeling it’ll be a few years yet before anyone picks up a sheet cake at the bakery.”

Carter (potentially “Carter”) looks over at the man. “Certainly not. I think the last party I attended with a bakery sheet cake was twenty-some years ago - the neighbor’s daughter, the one who was always kicking everyone.”

The man looks back. “None of the kids ever had one?”

She laughs. “As if you’d ever have allowed it.”

“Well, there was some time there—”

“Not that this isn’t adorable and all,” says Fury, “but if you’re meant to be Peggy Carter, who exactly is he meant to be?”

“My husband,” she responds promptly.

Fury looks over at the guy, gesturing a bit with his gun. “You have anything more to say on that?”

The man shrugs. “Not really.”

“Is she supposed to have a husband, whoever she is?” Maria asks.

“There have been rumors,” Fury admits. “But like I said, I’m not trusting anything after the last couple of days.”

“Hey, Talos,” calls Carol, “Just checking, but I thought we’d met all of your friends.”

A version of Maria's neighbor Tom, now wearing the sweatshirt they’d given Talos, pokes his head through the still open front door. “It’s a bit insulting, you know, assuming that we’d all know each other.”

“Well, do you happen to know these two?” Fury asks, trusting that Carol will keep control of anything that might happen as he turns to glare over his shoulder. “I’d like to make sure we’re all on the same team, regardless of species.”

Talos shrugs. “Seem human to me.”

“Sorry if I can’t exactly take your word for it.” Fury knows he sounds grumpy, but he’d been feeling good, and now _this_. Either he’s going to have to deal with an alien impersonating his boss - again - or he’s about to get fired. Talos returns inside and closes the door, as if Fury's troubles don't exactly top his list of worries.

“How long have you been married?” Carol asks. Even though her tone is curious, unhurried - no need for that anymore, when he can practically feel the power radiating from her - Fury can hear the test in it. 

“Forty-four years in September,” Carter answers back promptly.

“Kids?”

Her husband answers this time. “Four. Rosie, Drea, Emma, and Nate.”

“Or I suppose if you want to be more official about it,” Carter adds, “Rose, Andrea, Emma, and Nathaniel. And then there are the grandchildren...”

“Who’s the shortest of your kids?” fires off Maria, clearly trying for the element of surprise, and they both laugh, an established, private joke sort of laugh, before answering simultaneously, “Rose.”

Somehow that decides it. Fury finally stows his gun. There’s still a tiny chance that these are some new shapeshifters who’ve done their research, but if they are, they deserve credit for it.

“I apologize, Director,” says Fury, suddenly conscious that if she’s showed up here, she probably knows more about his actions over the past days than he’s comfortable with, and also that she’s probably noticed the scratches across his eye. Not the best introduction, overall.

She gives a deep, dignified nod. “As I said, I understand that things have been a bit trying for you.”

“So, if I can ask…” He forces himself not to scratch the back of his neck like a little kid. “Why exactly are you here?”

To his surprise, she turns to her husband. “Darling?”

He slips his arm out from the curve of hers and steps forward to the very base of the steps, his hands in his pockets. “I have some information for Captain Danvers, actually.”

Carol looks him over. “I’m guessing that this isn’t about back pay?”

He laughs, but somehow not quite. “Not exactly. I know that you’re about to head out there—” He gives a quick upward jerk of the chin, indicating the fullness of the velvet black sky. “And when you do, there’s someone you should look to run into. A Titan called Thanos.”

* * *

Carol and Mr. Carter, now introduced as Grant, sit on a pair of the porch chairs. He’s explaining something while Maria stands over them with her arms crossed and Monica pokes her head through the curtains to spy on them.

Fury brings a glass of lemonade to Director Carter, who is leaning against the car.

“Much appreciated, Agent,” she says, raising it to him before taking a shallow sip. Her hands are steady, but up so close he remembers that she’s been running the agency for decades, longer than he’s been alive, and that she fought in a world war before that.

He leans against the car beside her, crosses his arms. “Any chance you can tell me how your husband got ahold of all of these details about—” He points upward. “Things out there?”

He knows how insubordinate it is, nosing in on Grant Carter like he’s a perp, but he’s already held them at gunpoint so he figures he might as well. To his surprise, she actually smiles. It’s much more an agent’s smile than it is a mother’s or a grandmother’s - or maybe for her it’s both. She swirls the lemonade before sipping again. “He’s had quite the life, my husband,” she says. “And between caring for the children, taking courses, and lending a hand from his cubicle, he’s still managed to pick up a piece of fairly essential information here and there.”

Fury looks at the man on the porch, at his narrow frame, his khakis. There’s something familiar there; maybe just that central casting Nice Old Man look. Fury knows better than to judge solely on appearances, especially at the moment, but he can think of few people less likely to have “fairly essential information” than Grandpa over there. Still, the same could be said by an unsuspecting person in regards to Director Carter as well. “Balancing all that seems like a lot. Guess you married a real Captain America,” he says, sounding bland to avoid sounding sarcastic.

Her eyebrow flickers up and there’s a beat, but then she laughs. “Well, who else in the world would be able to keep up with me?” She drains the rest of her lemonade and places the glass on the hood of the car. She looks over at him, and he can see in her sharp eyes that regardless of what she says about cake and retirement parties, she has a fair few working years left in her. “Now tell me, Agent. What were you thinking would be your next step?”

“A nice vacation sounds just about right,” he suggests, despite knowing the futility.

And indeed, she tilts her head and says, “Really? And I was so looking forward to reading your report of the incident.”

“I’ll get on it, ma’am,” he says dutifully.

“I think those are her favorite words,” jokes Mr. Carter, walking back toward them across the lawn. Carol and Maria stand beside each other, watching him. Carol leans over to say something and Maria shakes her head fondly.

“Then isn’t it lucky I get to hear them so often,” the director tells him archly, a bit of a smile twitching at her mouth regardless. Fury picks up her glass and moves away from the car.

“It was good to meet you, Agent,” says the director, opening her car door and settling herself inside. Her husband walks around to the driver’s seat, but stops and looks at Fury over the roof of the car.

“It was _very_ good to meet you, Agent Fury,” he says, the creases around his mouth deepening. Fury can’t quite tell if it’s from laughter or pain or something else entirely.

“Be safe out there,” he says to cover all his bases, and as Mr. Carter gets into the car and closes the door, there’s a definite laugh at that.

“Does anyone get the feeling we’re missing something?” Maria asks after Fury has waved off the departing car and returned to the porch.

“I think I’m going to be having that feeling a lot for the next little while,” Fury comments.

“Well, I’ll leave you to that,” says Carol. She’s grinning. “Apparently I’ve got a universe to save.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one's a little goofy, so take with a grain of comedy-esque salt, I guess.


	14. 1970

He’s always taken by surprise when the memories come for him. It will be something small, usually: an article he goes to set aside because Bruce would be interested, or - even after all this time - a reach for his phone to check the weather before realizing the reflex won’t make sense for several more decades. The first Thanksgiving he spends with Peggy, he’s muddled through enough to have the turkey in the oven and the potatoes boiling on the stove and suddenly he remembers being on the run, holed up in an apartment in Sofia with Sam recounting stories of family holidays past as he taught Steve and Natasha to make “the best damn cornbread you’ll ever eat.” (Steve remembers the recipe and serves it at dinner, but can’t bring himself to taste it.)

There’s the time that Rose, independent minded as always, starts calling her new brother Natty, then Nat (over and over - “Nat, Nat, Nat”), until Steve, who does not yell at his children, finds himself barking at her to quit it before leaving the room. He apologizes to them all later, a mulish, wary-eyed Rosie in particular, but none of them ever uses the nickname again.

Once, he is waiting in line at the post office and recalls with a sudden and biting shudder that something of him is out there, frozen and insensate in the solitary ice while Steve lives this life. And then he realizes that Thor is somewhere now too, still young and princely, a warrior, already having lived a thousand years or more. Someone Steve could talk to, someone who would not know him, someone who can’t be reached. (The postal clerk offers condolences as he mails his package.)

The day Tony is born is particularly bad.

Steve knew that Maria was pregnant, knew it was going to happen soon. The date on the calendar triggered something familiar in the back of his mind when he went to write in the sleepover party Emma has scheduled for that evening. But he is still surprised when he gets the call.

It comes in the early hours. Peggy grumbles when the phone shrills into the dim morning quiet of their bedroom - she’d been on a late-night call and only got to sleep around 2 AM - so Steve rolls out of bed and over to the dresser to answer it.

“Steve!” It’s Howard, sounding entirely too awake. “Steve, he’s here!”

Steve massages his eyes for a moment, wondering if he has to rouse Peggy after all. Some diplomat, some dangerous figure he doesn’t know about…? But Howard is continuing, “—told me take her over to Mt. Sinai. Luckily I had Jarvis drive us because that woman really had her claws in my arm - hard to steer with that kind of grip on you. Figured the kid was ready to fall out of her, the way she was acting, but we were there all night.You know they let husbands come in for the main event these days? Crazy times. Thought Ana would be better at that sort of thing, though. Calming presence and all. She came out about an hour ago, brought me in to see him before they took him away. Ten fingers, ten toes and all, did great on that baby score test, and we’ve named him too! Anthony, for Maria’s father, but we’ll call him—”

“Tony,” Steve says softly, but it is lost under Howard’s joyful echo. 

He had thought that it would be Jarvis calling, pride and delight masked beneath British propriety. He imagined it like being informed about a royal birth: “It has just been announced that Mrs. Maria Stark was safely delivered of a boy at 3:43 A.M. and that she and the child are both doing well.” He could have stood for that, offered suitable congratulations on behalf of himself and the rest of the family, and hung up. But now it is Howard, bursting with unexpected eagerness about his son over the telephone line, and the appropriate amount of corresponding happiness seems more than Steve has to give.

There’s a sick twist in his gut as he thinks of the disdain and hurt in Tony’s voice whenever he spoke about Howard, and it only gets worse when his mind recalls the vivid details of Tony slumped in his armor that final time - the smoke of it all, the everywhere wreckage. He remembers, too strongly for a memory so far past and so far future, the beautiful sun and silence of everyone at the funeral for this child who’s just been born.

He doesn’t even notice Peggy there until she has eased the phone from his ear. “I hear you’ve some good news for us, Howard,” she says, her tone cheerfully dry in a way Steve can’t manage just now. He leans against the bureau and places his thumb on the inside of her wrist, even though he knows that it means the pulse he’s feeling is most likely his own.

Once she’s had her turn to be exuberantly hollered at, the story told lovingly all over again with little additions (Jarvis’s hurried trip back to the house to find the pre-purchased cigars, the little tip Howard had dropped for the nurses to make sure they didn’t go running to the papers), she asks when they should plan to come up and see the baby.

“Come up next weekend, if you can manage it,” says Howard. “Bring the kids! Well, maybe don’t _bring_ them, but park them with Dr. and Mr. Barnes and bring yourselves over.”

“And you’ve confirmed with Maria that she won’t mind?” Peggy asks. “It’s all likely a bit overwhelming between the birth and caring for a newborn, without adding the stress of entertaining.”

“I bet the Jarvises will be over the moon to see you,” Howard says, either not having heard or choosing to ignore her.

“I see I’ll be checking directly with your better half when she’s had an opportunity for some well-deserved rest,” Peggy says with a slight sigh, and then her voice softens. “And, truly, congratulations again, Howard.” She looks up at Steve’s still and somber face. “From all of us.”

* * *

Peggy covers it well, but she always needs a moment to settle in around babies when they’re this young. Steve doesn’t technically have much more practice than she does: he’d held Bucky’s kids at this age - mostly Libby; Davy wasn’t born until they’d moved back to DC - but even Emma was a toddler by the time she came into their lives, which means that he doesn’t have much day to day experience. Still, he knows without being asked that Peggy needs him to step up, so when Maria offers to let them hold the baby, he puts out his arms.

Tony is light and sleepy against him, with only a vague suggestion of dark hair. His mouth works at the air a little, dreamily, crusty suggestions of milk at the corners. Maria fed him just before they came. Steve rocks him a bit.

“He’s a sweet, sweet boy,” says Maria, fond and proud and fierce, even though Steve doubts the baby’s done anything to prove that, even though Maria looks tired through her natural elegance. There’s a bit of spit-up on the shoulder of the long, pale blue silk robe she’d greeted them in.

“You seem like you’re doing a great job,” Steve offers.

Maria, easing herself back to recline on the sofa, laughs. “Only because it’s four against one,” she says. “If I was doing this alone, I’d be crying along with him.”

Peggy stands from her settee and holds out graceful hands to take her turn. Steve passes the baby over gently, careful of his head. Tony makes a cranky little cry despite the precautions, but returns to sleep as Peggy begins to rock him rhythmically.

“He’s absolutely darling,” she tells Maria. “Or at least doing a very good impression at the moment.”

Maria says, “I’m glad you think so,” and Steve can see the sweet canniness to her smile that had once convinced him that she could handle Howard. “Because I—We—Howard and I have a request for the two of you.”

“What?” he asks warily, but just then the door opens, and Howard enters the sitting room. Peggy turns her back, holding the baby away from the sudden draft and the cloud of pollen Howard brings in with him clinging to his suit jacket.

“You didn’t start without me, did you?” he asks his wife, striding over to her.

She takes his hand and replies, “You’re only lucky that I didn’t - you promised to be home before they even arrived and I’ve been throwing the child at them as a distraction to cover for you.”

Howard bends to kiss her cheek. “You’re a very good woman,” he tells her, then goes to shake Steve’s hand and wrestle Peggy for a turn to hold the baby.

This turns out to be a poor idea: Tony makes his opinion of all of their antics very well known, and finally Maria takes the baby back herself and calls Ana to put him in the nursery.

“She means our room,” Howard says. “Spent months choosing the paint and just the right books, tracked down all the baby equipment in the world, but she can’t stand to have him on his own.”

“Volunteering to carry him back and forth a dozen times a night, then?” Peggy asks innocently. “How very helpful of you, Howard.” Maria and Steve snicker as Howard busies himself pouring coffee from the tray Jarvis had left on the side table for their refreshment. (No one bothers to tell him that it was put out when Steve and Peggy arrived and is now room-temperature at best.)

“Well,” says Maria, shifting over to let her husband sit beside her. “As I was saying before the interruption, we have something to ask you.”

“We’d like you to be Tony’s godparents,” Howard says, serious for once, although he ruins it immediately by pulling a horrible face after taking a sip of lukewarm coffee. He puts his cup on the table and tries to recover. “Be his guardians if there’s ever a need.”

Peggy glances over at Steve, who has settled himself to her right. She’d speculated that this was why the Starks had been so eager for them to visit in person, but Steve had insisted that they were simply new parents looking to show off their offspring and that there were surely other people who would be better suited to such a role.

There’s a reason he usually doesn’t argue with Peggy’s hunches.

“I’m honored. Truly,” says Peggy, striving to make clear the sincerity in her voice rather than the fact that she’s stalling. “I’m sure that we both are.”

“Of course we are. And I’m grateful that you would want to trust us with something like this.” Steve leans forward. “But are you sure we’re the right choice? We don’t live close, and things can get a little busy around our place. Maybe someone more local, someone who can offer him more time than we can really promise - plus, if you’re serious about the godparents business, someone who’s actually religious - maybe that would be better. Jarvis and Ana would probably be—”

“Too worn out for that sort of thing.” Maria reaches forward and covers his clasped hands with hers. “This is _exactly_ why we wanted it to be you. You held him for two minutes and you’re already thinking of what’s best for him.”

“Bucky,” Steve tries, one last time. “Buck and Layla—”

But Howard interrupts now, bringing a triumphant hand down on the table. “Didn’t I tell you that he’d be modest about it?” he says to Maria, then turns to Steve and says, “It’s you, pal. The two of you - the smartest, most capable woman I know, who’s already proven she can handle a Stark, and the best thing I ever—The best father in the world - there’s no one better.”

“So?” asks Maria with quiet hope, and it is clear that at least some part of her has registered Steve’s hesitation in a way that Howard hasn’t. She lets go of Steve’s hands and sits back against the couch again, although her expression is still kind. “Will you do it?”

Steve knows without even looking at Peggy that it is his choice and she will have his back either way. He thinks of Tony as he knew him, lost and brilliant and bold, friend and adversary. He thinks of tiny, fragile Tony as he held him just now, unformed and entire. He thinks about Tony’s daughter who Steve never got to hold at that age, who never got to place a grandchild in her father’s arms.

Maybe this time around.

* * *

They excuse themselves soon after, Maria clearly worn out and hanging on by the barest threads of her hostess smile. Peggy goes to speak with the Jarvises about joining them in seeing Angie’s new show tonight (“Come now, Mr. Jarvis, there’s no Benny Goodman these days to stop you from enjoying an evening out”) while Howard walks Steve down to the foyer.

“Any chance—” Howard starts, and even though his tone isn’t wheedling or sly the way it usually is, Steve knows what he is going to ask. “Any chance you’ll give me a hint about the future of it all?”

“Howard, you know that I—”

“Sure, sure, I’ve heard it all before. But just this once, tell me if things turn out. For him.”

It’s a selfish bit of manipulation, but a parental one too: “How will my child grow up? How can I protect them from the harm that is in store?” Did such thoughts ever come to the other Howard, the one who was caught up in weapons and cold war and past victories, who seemed to have been gone even when there, cruel and disappointed in a way that led only to more disappointment? Had he showed this sort of wonder and worry in the beginning only to let it fade?

“I can’t tell you things like that,” he says, driving unyieldingly forward over Howard’s protest. “But as a father, I’ll tell you this: you need to take time with him.”

Howard laughs. “Steve, I’m sure I’ll have a few minutes to catch a ball once he actually starts being able to control his own hands.”

Steve shakes his head. “Not just that.” He doesn’t know where the idea comes from or if it will fix anything, but he says it anyway. “You should take a day off every week. One day, to give the rest of them a break and so you can spend time getting to know him.”

“I don’t think there’s much to know about him yet.” Howard laughs again, but there’s an edge to it now, the laugh of a man who isn’t accustomed to interventions into his business. Steve questions if there would be a laugh at all if it wasn’t him, or perhaps Peggy, saying it.

“If you don’t start now,” Steve predicts, “you never will. And, sure, at the beginning you’d be missing sleeping and diapers and crying - things I never got with my kids - but soon it’ll be first steps and first words and first day of college. The time goes fast, Howard, faster than you can believe. You asked for advice, and there’s mine: spend a day out of the office and taking care of your son.”

“Not exactly a convenient time,” Howard says brusquely. “You were the one who said I should throw those AGU characters a bone and give the keynote, and then the whole thing went off between the ones who are saying the planet’s going to explode if we don’t do something and the ones who say the planet’s going to explode _even if_ we do something. Most of them say it’s getting too hot, but then there are the ones who say the problem is cold. And of course there are the ones who say it’s not a problem at all. I’m starting a whole new division to try to straighten things out, so I’m not sure that all those expert scientists I just hired are going to take too kindly to my kicking my feet up for a whole day.”

“You’re in charge. And you did just say that they’re the experts,” Steve reminds him, then tries a different tack. “And who knows? Your boy could be the next expert if you’re around to help him.”

That seems to strike something in Howard. “As if he’d ever be an egghead like that.” He looks irately Steve and adds, “And didn’t I tell you he’s already a genius? Aced everything the doctors threw at him. That’s genetics, pal.”

* * *

“So,” Peggy asks as they begin making their way back to Bucky’s. Jarvis had offered to drive them, but they’d declined. “Attempting to engineer fatherhood now, are we?”

“He didn’t do a very good job the first time around,” Steve says.

She looks at him, gentle but shrewd. “And do you expect he’ll actually make the time as you suggested? I believe Howard loves Maria, but since they were married he spends as much time in the office as ever. Perhaps more, now that he doesn’t need to excuse himself to charm the next starlet in the pack.”

Steve shrugs. “I don’t know if he’ll listen, or if it will change things, or if it might make it all worse. But I know I had to try something.”

With a fond sigh but no surprise, she says, “Of course you did.” They continue walking even as are separated for a moment by a tour group taking up the sidewalk, Peggy moving in toward the wall and Steve stepping off the curb into the street. When they rejoin each other, she twines her fingers with his. “I’m sure you feel a particular responsibility too, now that we’ve been named godparents.”

Steve sighs himself. “Well, we’ll see how that goes.”

“What do you mean?” She looks up at him. “They sounded quite firm in their intentions, if you’ll recall.”

“I know that,” Steve replies. “But you might end up changing your mind and sabotaging the whole deal.”

She pulls away. “Steve Rogers, I would do no such thing!” He laughs; sometimes he likes to be reminded that beneath the spy and the director and the mother, there’s the boarding school girl who kept secrets on her word of honor and considered welching a criminal offense.

“You just wait,” he says. “I have the feeling that no matter what I try, some things can’t be avoided - and Tony Stark’s personality might be one of them.”

“That’s no reason to malign me,” she says, settling back against him though clearly still touchy. “I do have some fortitude. I did help bring up Rose, after all.”

They pause at a cross street to wait for the stoplight. Steve glances up at the clearing sky, a brilliant May blue emerging. “You’re right. And so did I. Maybe I’ll actually have the upper hand this time around.”

Peggy tells him airily, “Well, I perhaps wouldn’t go that far. When have you ever with the children?” and laughs when he glares down at her.

The light changes and, clasped hands still together, they step off the curb and cross onward.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The stuff Howard's referring to with the AGU is a couple of relatively early lectures by several scientists about the need for climate change action that were given at the 1969 meeting of the American Geophysical Union. Would Howard, a wealthy inventor and private industrialist with few academic credentials, have been invited to speak there? Today, probably yes. At the time - questionable. I do think that considering the diminished need for weaponry in this version of things, directing Stark Industries more toward this new science/tech/innovation challenge make sense.
> 
> Or I'm just going with it.
> 
> This chapter did come out a bit rough, and sorry _again_ for having basically all the chapters within three or four years of each other. But I have a conflicted conception of the Starks, and I think Steve does somewhat as well, plus the Starks have pretty complex feelings toward each other...I really did have to begin to deal with it sometime, and it apparently wanted to come out this week, so there you go.


	15. 1961-1963

Peggy is thinking about the unpleasant meeting she has later in the day. She is thinking about whether or not to institute a typing element to SHIELD training. She is thinking about Thanksgiving coming up next week and how long she has been in this country if she’s actually beginning to remember the holiday. She is thinking of the lovely weather outside, and about what Steve might be making for supper. She is thinking of calling ahead to request something particularly decadent for dessert, as she’ll certainly deserve it after her meeting.

She is thinking all of that, and then Agent Azad appears in the doorway, white-faced, saying the exact words that make her forget all the rest.

* * *

The windows are almost entirely dark by the time she arrives home, though she can see the glimmer of the few lamps that Steve has left lit to guide her inside. He sits up waiting for her sometimes, but she suspects he wasn't sure whether or not she would be home before morning. She had doubted too.

She has the feeling that he's still lying awake in their bed, regardless.

* * *

He had caught her in her office that afternoon, around 2. He rarely calls there although he knows that she will always answer for him.

"I had the radio on," he told her, and though the timbre of his voice was familiar, the bleakness there was not. "I was tuning past one of the soaps and they broke in. Are you alright? How are things there?"

"It's absolute chaos." Her office was usually on the quieter side, set slightly away from the more highly populated areas of headquarters, but it didn't seem to matter today. She shut her door anyway, turning her back against it as she pressed the receiver to her ear and held the telephone base at her hip. "I should have pushed about the open topped car."

He was quiet, refusing either to blame or to speculate. Her phone line was likely not monitored, but it felt risky anyway. "I'm going to pick up the kids at school," he said instead.

"Now? It's nearly time for them—" she protested automatically, although the care of the children had largely and traditionally been his domain.

"I'm going to get the kids," he said again. "I'm going to bring them home."

She remembered, almost against her will, the way his voice had been steady, so steady, nearly entirely steady, as they had talked about dancing at the Stork Club after the war was over. She could hear the underlying tremble more clearly these days.

"Yes," she said. "Alright. I'll see you later tonight...well, later sometime. Kiss them all for me."

"I will."

* * *

She isn't hungry, although she knows that there would be a covered plate or a neatly arranged container in the refrigerator if she looked. She hadn't eaten earlier either, even once she'd been called to the White House and the vice president—President Johnson, newly arrived back in Washington, had requested some food. He was taking easily to the position, perhaps because he had always thought it should have been his.

She'd had to wait until the general meeting had ended, until the rest of the intelligence heads had taken their opportunities to brief their new commander in chief. Her briefing had taken a while even once she had the chance to start. She could see the strain in him by the end, and not only because it was now morning and he probably just wanted to join Lady Bird at The Elms, not only because the things that she was discussing were about more than diplomatic affairs or an understanding of weaponry systems. She recalled that he'd had a heart attack while still in the Senate which had nearly killed him, and had to bring out her poker face to avoid the thought of the country moving further down the line of succession.

"You should get some sleep, sir," she had told him as she finished, and he'd laughed.

"The last time I slept, Director, the world was an entirely different place," he said. "You know what that's like?"

The poker face again. "I think I have something of an idea."

* * *

She switches off the lower floor lights and walks up the stairs. She carries her shoes in her hand, and the sensation of the carpeting against her feet feels particularly luxurious.

Nate’s room is first, which is lucky. An echo of terror grips Peggy’s heart as she imagines what would have happened if she had started elsewhere and found an empty bed. The two of them are curled together, Nate against the wall, And—Drea, Drea now, she must remember—Drea pressed close against him. This isn’t the first time Steve or Peggy has found them like this, though they have been a part of the family for close to nine months now, but tonight she suspects that the need for closeness came from something more than habit or a general desire to be with the person who has always meant safety. She listens to their deep, matching breaths for a moment before she closes the door and returns the room to darkness.

Rose's room next. Peggy’s eldest lies amidst tangled blankets, her face halfway mashed into the pillow. She has always been an energetic sleeper, seeming in motion even while dead to the world. Peggy remembers coming home some days to find her passed out mid-tantrum in the middle of the living room while Steve tiptoed around her, thankful for the reprieve.

The bedroom floor is a considerable mess, clothing dropped at random, stacks of books, crumpled pages overflowing the wastepaper basket. She will tell Rose to take some time to clean over the weekend. No, how can it matter? No, that will be the best thing, returning to normalcy, not allowing the uncertain fear to fester and become overwhelming.

Her own room is nearly across the hall from Rosie’s but she passes by it. She skips Drea’s closed and empty one now and walks to the end instead, to where Emma sleeps. The tiny shine of her nightlight is visible in the crack beneath the door. Her youngest daughter is not afraid of falling asleep in the dark, but she _is_ afraid of awaking in it, unable to process the world, something Peggy certainly respects. They’ve kept a light on for her since she was old enough to ask for it.

Peggy cracks the door and peers around it, taking in Emma’s space. Her eyes roam past the open closet with the neat row of dresses swinging over the rod, past the dollhouse Steve had built, to the bed where Emma lies watching her back.

Peggy holds a finger to her lips and grasps the doorknob, ready to slip back out, but Emma sits up instead. She turns on her bedside lamp, squinting adorably and blinking through the return to full brightness.

“We ate soup for dinner,” Emma signs. Peggy holds back a wince. Steve’s soup recipe is one of the few he has left from his mother. When he makes it, the occasion is either especially happy or quite dire. “You weren’t here.”

Peggy comes closer, resting herself very lightly at the foot of the bed. “I’m sorry,” she tells Emma. “I was working. We got very busy.”

“Because President Kennedy was shot?” Emma asks, and it turns Peggy’s stomach a bit to see her small fingers forming first those famous initials and then the shape of a gun. “Daddy says the president is dead. He heard it on the radio. Somebody killed him.”

Peggy nods. For a moment that is all she can do. She gazes down at her hands until she knows that they will not tremble, even with simple exhaustion, when she raises them. “Yes. The president was killed.”

* * *

The afternoon of his inauguration, she had given Jack Kennedy the same sort of briefing that she’d just given his successor. The next evening, returned home to New Jersey, she had sat at the kitchen table with Steve and pronounced herself unimpressed. Oh, the new president certainly seemed charmed and charming, and one couldn’t deny the energy he brought to the country, but did he have the sharpness and decisiveness and balance to truly do the job?

“This is the presidency, not a garden party, and certainly nothing his father can simply fix up for him if he makes a mistake,” she had said.

“Give him time,” Steve offered. “He’s young. Sometimes you need time to grow into these things, and I guess he has enough extra now.” In another world, Bucky Barnes, unknown and unknowing, would shoot this president only a few short years later. In this one, Bucky was getting married next month. Steve allowed a smile to come over his face. He covered her hand with his. “And besides, he has you to guide him.”

She’d tried her best, but every time they met simply reinforced her earlier impression. The president was bright enough, but too stubborn on certain issues and too passive on others. He allowed his brother to argue his part in meetings, opening himself up to charges not only of nepotism but weakness as well. It was not truly her domain, but she had once demanded of him the precise reason he was not doing more to support civil rights work in the south, to push for better legislation, pressing him until he burst out at her in that ridiculous accent, “Not that your agency has any role in it, Madam, but I am the president of an entire country, and some of the citizens of that country see things differently than you do.”

“And sometimes those citizens are wrong,” she had snapped back. “And as a leader, it is your responsibility to do the right thing regardless of what it makes people think of you.”

He had sat down behind the desk and picked up some brief, giving only a single cold glance up at her. “I assume you can see yourself out, Mrs. Carter.”

Pouring her tea that night, Steve said, “Of course he isn’t right. But in some ways, he isn’t wrong either. He’ll need congressional support if he wants to get civil rights legislation passed and he isn’t likely to get enough of it.” He sighed and passed a hand over his face. “It was something that was able to be pushed through out of national grief. So the nation doesn’t mourn that one thing, but it will keep mourning in a different way.”

“Well.” Peggy set her jaw. “If they were able to pass a law then, we will pass it now. And before that, I will have the man standing up and publicly showing support instead of waiting on the sidelines and hoping that history will forget his faults.”

* * *

“Nana called,” Emma says, and for one brief and strange moment, Peggy’s mind translates the sign for “grandmother” and brings up an image of her own Grandmother Carter, who had passed at home during the war. She blinks it away. “She was crying - Rose said.”

Winifred Barnes wouldn’t hear a word against the man. The descendant of Irish immigrants, a Catholic boy who had managed to become president. She had cried when they had buried the baby a few months back. Peggy wasn’t surprised that she had cried today. “She—” Peggy nearly signs the word “admired” but changes without fully realizing the choice. “Nana loved the president. Many people loved him.”

“So _why_? Why did somebody kill him?” Emma asks, the signs coming faster now even as confusion is gritted across her features. “Why did somebody want to hurt Mrs. Kennedy?”

“Mrs. Kennedy being hurt - it was an accident,” Peggy tells her. That is the speculation at this point, at least. She had seen the woman first at the air field, then more closely during her visit to the White House. It had felt as if she was offering condolences to a ghost, albeit one with a heavily bandaged arm. (Someone had finally convinced her to take off the blood-spattered suit, but it had done nothing for the look in her eyes.) One of the bullets presumably meant for her husband had gone wide and needed to be removed by Dr. Burkley. What happened, Peggy supposed, when instead of a specially trained sniper, there was only a man with neglected marksmanship skills and a troublesome weapon who had somehow still managed to become an assassin.

Emma curls her knees up against her chest. “But why did he hurt _anybody_?” she asks with the stubbornness which is a near universal family characteristic.

Peggy holds herself still. “I don’t know,” she finally admits, the words forming slowly between her hands, as if she is dreaming them. Her mind has been racing all day with other possibilities: something international, something supernatural, someone inspired by hatred for a man finally standing up for racial equality, Hydra returned with its ugly and many-headed menace that they thought they had buried. “I think the man - he had troubles. He was angry.” In the end it would probably come back to that: simply this man and his rage. She barely has the energy to reflect the emotion in her face, certainly none for the foolish exaggeration they sometimes use to make Emma laugh. Her daughter doesn’t seem to notice. She yawns, but still looks ponderous. Her fluffy curls tremble as she shakes her head.

“Even if he was angry - it is not okay to hurt people.”

Peggy stands, using the motion to keep her face clear. She kisses the top of Emma’s head, guiding her carefully back toward the pillows even as she does. Her daughter’s hair smells like Johnson’s No More Tears.

“You’re right - it is not okay.” She tries to keep the words slow on her fingers, her expression calm. “But sometimes people do things that are not okay.”

“Then you catch them? You fix it?” Emma yawns again. Her signing is growing muzzier around the edges, her hands dropping onto the blankets as soon as she’s finished the question.

Peggy swallows. There are certainly occasions when she has been untruthful with her children - when necessitated by her work, the little fibs or kind falsehoods that parenting sometimes requires - but this feels more visceral. It is not the first time there has been a misstep in the way she and Steve try to guide things along. It is not the first time she has agonized over the choices she’s made, the choices that might have made things worse. Only this time, the whole country knows what they have lost. This time her own children will wake up a little warier, believing a little less in the world as they had known it, because their parents had the hubris to think that they could anticipate everything, shape the world as they wanted it between their hands.

“Yes,” Peggy lies. “Then we fix it.” She kisses her daughter again and then she turns off the lamp and creeps quietly out the door, shutting it behind her, leaving the room in just about darkness.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A few resources that I looked at while writing this chapter:
> 
>   * [The Zapruder film](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydYBin_6pvk)
>   * [The Warren Commission Report](https://www.archives.gov/research/jfk/warren-commission-report)
>   * The digitized [presidential appointment books](https://jfklibrary.libguides.com/jfkschedule) offered by the JFK Library
>   * [The Flight from Dallas](https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a24834/flight-from-dallas-1013/), a recounting of the aftermath of the shooting and the flight back to Washington. (Most viscerally upsetting fact from this article: Jackie Kennedy's right glove was so soaked in blood that, when she removed it, it dried in the shape of her hand)
>   * The [CBS broadcast](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDOojsg62O0) from that afternoon (this whole thing is  _absolutely whack_ \- they continue to play As the World Turns even as they flash in with increasingly dire news)
>   * [My Six Years with JFK](https://www.americanheritage.com/my-six-years-jfk) by Richard Reeves
>   * A bunch of conspiratorial websites that I won't link to (I am _deeply_ non-conspiratorial, but in the MCU there legit was a conspiracy about this particular issue, so I went to the experts)
> 

> 
> This one's not my fave, but this is the year I'm going to finally go to the JFK house museum (♫ I am gonna make it...♪) and I needed something apropos. Also wanted to explore more about what happens when the people who think they have everything under control to build a better world find that something has slipped away from them.


	16. 1968

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sexual assault content warning for this one. It's not overly detailed or lengthy, but if that's something sensitive for you, just a heads up.

Rose has a busy week coming up: a chemistry test on Monday, play practice on Tuesday and Thursday (they’re doing _Bye Bye Birdie_ and she’s Ursula; not exactly what she wanted, but at least it’s better than _The Crucible_ , which is what they did in the fall), plans for her birthday, and she’d even agreed to babysit for the Nelsons’ twin monsters to make some money for the summer. But Paul Roberts is in the drama club with her and he convinces her that going to the movies with him on Friday night will leave her plenty of time to study and get to all the rest.

“Is he in any of your classes?” Mom asks when she tells them that evening. Rose sits on the counter beside where Dad is dicing cucumbers. Mom watches them from the table. She came home pretty early - for Mom - though Dad had taken one look and gone to the drinks cart instead of putting up water for tea.

“He’s a year older, so I’d hope not.” Rose swings her feet a little, heels making small, rhythmic clicks against the lower cabinets. Mom purses her mouth in an irritated way against the rim of her glass; she isn’t particularly in favor of Rose’s counter sitting in the first place.

“An eleventh grader, huh?” Dad scrapes the cucumbers into a blue-edged serving bowl, one of the free with purchase grocery store variety he so eagerly collects. He takes a tomato from the bag and starts cutting into it too. “I’ve never heard you mention him before.”

“We don’t see each other much outside of drama meetings.”

“But you have an interest in getting to know him?” Mom asks. Sometimes it’s annoying how she and Dad trade off questions like they’re tennis partners.

“It’s just something I’m trying out. An experiment,” Rose offers. Mom lifts an eyebrow just as Dad lets out a “hmm” sound. That’s even more annoying. When Dad goes to check the chicken in the oven, Rose steals one of his tomato cubes in retaliation. Swallowing it, she adds, “It’s not as if I’m about to go get pinned.”

“Oh, you’re not going steady for good?” Dad says dryly, sliding out the pan and resting it on the stovetop. It’s Aunt Layla’s recipe with all the spices and dried fruit, and Rose breathes in deeply, taking in the garlic and cinnamon and whatever else. She knows most of her friends don’t have this sort of stuff for dinner, but there’s a reason they like coming over to her house.

Mom finishes off the last of her drink and sets the glass down. “Tell me,” she says seriously. “What’s the story, morning glory?”

“Ha ha, the two of you. Did you make that stand-up booking?” Rose hops off the counter - a distressingly far distance - and goes over to the cutlery drawer, counting out silverware. “Try to keep a lid on the comedy stylings of Carter and Carter when you meet him.”

“But how will we impress him without them?” Dad asks innocently, spooning rice onto a platter.

Mom stands from the table and comes to take out the plates. She kisses Dad’s cheek as she passes. “Just be yourself, darling.”

Rose makes a face. “Maybe none of that either,” and her parents laugh and call the rest of the family for dinner.

* * *

Paul pulls up on time and comes to the door to pick her up. He shakes her dad’s hand, calls him “sir,” glances up at him with slightly shaking knees, when anyone with sense could tell that the person he should really be afraid of has the royal accent and neat skirt and blouse combination.

Rose’s siblings trip down the stairs as soon as the knock comes, sizing Paul up through squinted eyes.

"Where are you two going?" Drea asks, clearly having been appointed to speak for the others - usually Rose's job.

"To a movie," Paul says, trying to be confident about it, as if Drea's just some smart aleck. Lula-Cat appears in that slinky, scowling way of hers, rubbing herself against Drea’s ankles and staring up at Paul like a witch’s familiar. A bit of that confidence drains from him as he stares back.

In a tone that she learned from Mom, Drea asks, "And what movie will you be seeing?" She crosses her arms over her chest. Mom and Dad look down at the floor, pressing their lips together in matching lines to avoid laughing.

"I'm not sure yet."

"And why did you ask Rose out in the first place?"

Paul stops watching Nate translating for Emma, the two of them snickering. He glances over at Rose instead, giving a little shrug. "She seems like she's a fun person to spend time with."

Her parents trade looks, maybe because it's a little generic, but it's still nice of him to say. Rose gives him a smile.

"I think it's time to go," she says, checking her watch for effect. Paul's shoulders sag a little in relief but he hitches a smile back onto his own face.

"It was nice to meet you all," he says. He shakes hands with Rose's father again, then after a beat, takes her mother's offered hand as well.

Paul opens the door and starts down the front walk. Rose follows. She's nearly at the driveway when her father calls her name.

"Don't forget your sweater," he says, handing it over even though she'll have pretty minimal chances for cold between the car and the inside of the theater. Mom walks up behind him and places a hand on his back.

"Be safe, Rosie," she says, and Rose hugs them both quickly before she turns again and climbs into the car.

* * *

"Are you sure you don't want to go to the drive-in?" Paul asks, but Rose is smart enough to know what people get up to at the drive-in, so she says the theater will be fine.

When they arrive, Paul wants to buy tickets to _Astro-Zombies_ , and when Rose says that she thinks they should see something else, he tells her that he thought she'd be the kind of girl who didn't mind seeing a gruesome flick. Rose tries to think of a more polite way to say that she happens to like horror just fine, but this particular movie seems entirely stupid. She can't think of one, so she ends up saying just that.

"Well, what do you want to see?" he asks, trying to laugh it off, although he purses his mouth and shoves his hands in the pockets of his nice pants as he does.

"How about _Yours, Mine, and Ours_?" she suggests, nodding to the poster.

"Aw, you just like it because there are all those cute boys," he says. Her hands curl a little beneath the sweater she has draped over them and she grits her teeth, but she makes an effort to hold back her words. He probably wouldn't believe her anyway if she told him that she hadn't noticed them, she just likes Lucille Ball is all - he'd say that she was just making excuses.

They finally compromise on _Planet of the Apes_. She doesn't like it too much, but at least there's popcorn, and Paul sprang for peanut M&M's.

They talk about the movie on the way back to the car. Rose tries to pretend that she's not yawning, but doesn’t really try to pretend she liked the movie. She does wish she had paid more attention so she could argue her points better, but isn’t the fact that she didn’t _want_ to pay attention sort of an indictment of quality anyway?

As Paul turns out of the parking lot, she wonders what happens next. She sort of wants to declare the experiment a failure and go home, but if he offers to take her for ice cream or a hamburger, she could probably sit through it.

She asks him who he thinks is going to start getting the lead roles once Carrie Epps, the best actress and singer in the school, graduates next month, and they talk about that for a while, then about Mr. Kemper, the English teacher he had last year and she has now. It's been about ten minutes when she realizes that they're not going somewhere she recognizes.

"Are you trying to get to my house the back way?" she asks. Home is a little remote, and the roads can be confusing, especially in the dark or for someone who doesn't know them well.

He laughs, a soft, two-note chuckle. "Not exactly."

"So where are we going?"

“Just a little someplace,” he says reassuringly, although he only has one hand on the wheel, the other creeping across the car to try to hold hers. “I think you’ll like it.”

Even with only an inkling of what he means, Rose suspects otherwise. "Stop the car, Paul,” she snaps. “Stop. Now."

And he actually does, pulling off to the side of the country road. She peers out the window, trying to figure out where they are. Before she can turn back to face him and ask again, she hears his voice, low and sort of gleeful: "I guess you can't wait either." And then his hand is on the back of her head, pressing her toward him. His mouth pushes against hers, strange and a little too forceful. There is a moment where she feels like a doll, feels like she’s in a movie, feels as if this is some sort of laughable trick, not really happening and certainly not to her.

She bites his lip, hard.

“What the hell, Rose?” He yanks himself back, keeping control enough not to bang his head on the car window. He presses his fingers to his mouth in shock.

“What the hell with you?!” She stumbles over the words as if she’s just learning the language and it embarrasses her, but there’s enough anger there that he doesn’t seem to notice. “What makes you think I wanted that?”

“You know.” He crosses his arms. “You’re always a ham at meetings, you’re loud in the halls. Everyone knows girls like that are up for anything.”

“‘ _Everyone’_ is full of shit,” she says, jaw and fists and shoulders tight enough to hurt. “And so are you.”

He puts his hands on the wheel and blows out a breath. After so many years, Rose can recognize someone counting to ten to keep ahold of their patience.

When he turns to her again and speaks, his voice is calmer, soothing. “I’m sorry - I should have given you a little warning. But this is a good way to end the night, I think.” He leans toward her again, a little slower but still purposeful, inevitable as time. “It’ll be good, I promise.”

Rose does her own count to ten, then does it again. She is too familiar with the looks people give her if she lets herself get worked up: automatically discounting her arguments, lowering their opinion of her, thinking of her as hysterical, unreasonable, impossible to listen to. “No, thank you,” she finally says, impressed by how firm and normal it sounds. “I’d like to go home.”

“Hey, I showed you a good time, did things right,” Paul says, pulling back a little but still close enough to smell the turning scent of peanuts and chocolate on his breath. “You don’t have to be such a bitch about it.”

There are certain skills that Carters are taught starting at a young age. They begin learning to cook by stirring the big mixing bowl, then move on to measuring out ingredients, then to chopping and reading recipes. Their first lessons in doing laundry are about separating colors and being lifted up by Dad to pour detergent, years before they are about folding or ironing. And they go out to the backyard and learn to throw a punch in preparation to learn about weak spots and how to overwhelm a larger opponent - self-defense because of the sort of people Mom tangles with through work, because of the what-ifs of the world, because when Rose loses her temper, she’d better be smart about it.

She forgets most of it in the moment. There hadn’t been a lot of training situations like this. Her fingers curl automatically into a good fist. She socks him in the solar plexus because it’s the first thing she reaches.

He tucks in on himself, all the air rushing out of him. It’s a minute before he can even moan. She’s out of the car by then, her sweater balled up in her arms. She considers running into the trees, waiting until he leaves - she doubts that he would chase her - but she thinks of what her mother would do and stands her ground. The car starts after another minute and Rose wonders if he’s going to gun the engine or shout at her out the window. He just drives away.

She puts on the sweater even though there’s just the barest chill in the May air.

It is a couple of days from the full moon, which gives her enough light to see. She follows the road back. It is alive with the sounds of crickets, the smell of leaves and dirt and blooming things. Luckily, she only really owns comfortable shoes - it feels farther than she remembered before she reaches a gas station.

The boy behind the counter lets her use the phone. He has a sleepy, vacant expression that makes Rose wonder if he’ll even remember having spoken to her once she’s gone.

She takes deep breaths as the line rings, trying to prepare to sound calm and controlled.

“Hello?”

She doesn’t answer her father at first. She isn’t ready yet.

“Hello?”

“Dad?” Her voice wavers, but only a little. “Come pick me up, please.”

He doesn’t question what happened, doesn’t overwhelm her with words. “Where are you?” he asks immediately, just as she knew he would.

* * *

He is there fifteen minutes later.

She slides into the passenger seat of the station wagon. It feels odd after everything that’s happened to be in the same old car that’s conveyed her to the grocery store and home from play rehearsal and on a million silly errands.

Dad doesn’t drive right away. He just cups a gentle hand to the back of her head. “Are you okay?”

The sob shivers its way out of her. She presses the heels of her hands to her eyes, feeling the tears there. Everything about him is so familiar. She finds her face against his shoulder as if she’s just been tipped over. He puts an arm around her and holds tight.

* * *

She tells him what happened as they drive home. Usually Rose’s stories are Technicolor, made up of details and meandering footnotes. Tonight becomes all facts.

Her dad is quiet afterward. He takes his eyes off the road to glance at her. “How do you feel?”

“Angry,” she says immediately, and in the there-and-gone-again light she thinks she sees a little smile at that. “But also stupid. That I just trusted him.”

“It’s not stupid to expect people to do the right thing,” says Dad. “It’s not stupid to trust people.”

She sniffs. “So how do I figure out who to trust?”

“You always ask the hard questions, Rosie.” Dad switches on his turn signal as he gets to the area close to their house. Everything looks somehow elaborately familiar, her eyes picking up little features that she usually doesn’t think twice about. “I think you watch how people act and react. You see what they’re like when things get hard. You pay attention to what your gut says, and you ask the people you already trust what they think. It’s okay to take the time you need to make a decision. And I hope that next time, things are nothing like this.”

She looks out the window and says to the O’Shea’s mailbox as it rushes past, “What if I don’t want there to be a next time?”

“Then that’s your choice,” he tells her. “But I think it’d be a shame to maybe miss out on something great because of what happened tonight.”

“It isn’t that.” She still can’t look at him, turning instead to stare through the windshield. “I just—When I look at boys, I don’t feel anything. Not that I want them to take me out on dates, not that I want to kiss them, nothing. I never have. I don’t know that I ever will.”

Most people she knows would never bring these sorts of things up with a parent, or maybe even with friends. But sometimes Rose can still remember the way the wildness would beat through her unrelentingly when she was young, forcing her to act out just as unrelentingly - and when she does, she still hears his voice in her head: “Be careful of yourself, Rose” and “Remember to breathe, Rosie girl.” He’s earned her trust, even if releasing this secret makes her want to pull it right back in, tuck it away again within herself where it was safe.

“Well.” He pauses for just a beat, then asks, “What about not boys? Are there girls, or anybody?”

There’s nothing worried or angry in the words as they sit in the air. It’s the response barely anyone else she knows would give. The breath loosens in her chest.

Sometimes she gets trust right.

Rose shakes her head. She doesn’t remember where, but she’s lost the ribbon she had used to keep her hair back. She thought it had looked sort of fancy but fun, and it was the same shade of green as the shirt under her jumper. “I know when someone is pretty, or—or handsome and things like that, but I don’t feel anything about it. All my friends have talked about liking this boy or that one - I just never understood it. I see the way you and Mom are with each other and I know it’s real, but I don’t feel anything like that.” She remembers to take in a breath. “I meant what I said when I called it an experiment. I just wanted to see if things would change when I was actually out there. Maybe I would start feeling something, even a little. But there still isn’t anything.”

He turns up the long drive, parking up by the house. He turns off the engine and shifts to look at her, holding her face between his hands. It’s clear that he’s choosing his words with care. “Maybe you’ll never start feeling things like that, or maybe you will, or only a little, or sometimes, or with just a certain person. Whatever happens, Rosie, you always have people to trust. You always have people who love you. Do you know that?”

She nods, his big palms against her cheeks. “I knew that you would come pick me up wherever I was.”

“I always will,” he says. “You should know that too.” And he brings her inside where Mom has made cocoa and lights up the backyard in case Rosie wants to spend some time punching things.

She does.

* * *

The next time Dad is called unexpectedly to pick her up from somewhere, it is the police station. She’s been caught breaking into the school to use the new front office xerox machine to make copies of a pamphlet modeled on The Torch, the high school yearbook. This version includes only boys, at least so far. Instead of senior superlatives like “Best Dressed” and “Most Athletic,” there’s “Most Likely to Stick His Hand Up Your Skirt in the Cafeteria Line” and “Best at Pretending to Be a Nice Guy Until You’re Alone With Him.” Paul, who hasn’t looked at her in drama club since that night, is labeled “Best at Jumping to Conclusions About Who Wants His Mouth on Theirs.”

To be more precise, she wasn’t actually caught sneaking in to do the copying, or even sneaking out again. She was caught sneaking _back in_ because she had forgotten to turn the xerox machine off.

She’d sent the other girls with her off ahead while she took care of it, which is why she’s the only one at the station. The deputy looks unwittingly impressed that she’d somehow managed to do it all by herself, and he doesn’t even yet know about the copies already distributed through the slats of all the student lockers. Rose just smiles, trying for mysterious.

“Do you have something to say for yourself?” Dad asks as he stands in the doorway, arms crossed. Rosie can’t bring herself to see him as forbidding. She grins over at him.

“This sort of pick up is much more me, don’t you think?”

He stands there with his face set for another minute before he sighs and drops his arms. “It probably is,” he admits, and goes to ask the deputy how he can get her home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [1968 high school yearbook reference](http://repearyhs.org/yearbooks/1968-yearbook/)
> 
>  
> 
> [Popular US high school plays and musicals through the decades](https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2019/07/31/427138970/the-most-popular-high-school-plays-and-musicals)
> 
> Different versions of The Telephone Hour, which is a super fun number from _Bye Bye Birdie_ : [original Broadway cast](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8xc-fmS_RA)/[movie soundtrack](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3M4fSMNjE4)/[full ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sPU3ymk2ms)[movie scene with dance number](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sPU3ymk2ms)/[high school play version](https://youtu.be/qXsnmVoIq40?t=101)


	17. 1956

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Heads up: significant talk of miscarriage and mention of child death in this one, as well as a brush with period typical homophobia.

The first two times, it happens early. She takes a few days off from work. Steve, red-eyed and trying to hide it, brings her hot water bottles for the cramps, and steak and eggs because the doctor said she needs to recover the lost iron, and dime store thrillers that she finds herself holding open even as she stares out through the window. She overhears him murmuring to Bucky about it over the phone, running a hand over his crumpled forehead and uncharacteristically ignoring the charges, but she doesn’t say a word to anyone. Howard jokes that the next time she needs a few days off to get personal with her husband, she can just say so, and she rolls her eyes and tells him that he has quite enough of his own business to handle without sticking his nose into hers, and hopes that he does not notice the pencil snapped between her hands.

The third time, she is twenty-one weeks along, already starting to show. Her secretary had quietly congratulated her and offered use of a decade-old copy of Dr. Spock. The baby announcement card, mocked up by Steve in the joyously tumultuous early days of the first pregnancy and tucked away until now, is refreshed and printed up and sent out to friends. Peggy has already begun discussing time away after the birth with an irritated and blushing Colonel Phillips and a delightedly blasé Howard. The room which they still avoid calling the nursery has gained a few distinctly nursery-like features. She has an appointment with a tailor set for a Friday to preview potential maternity options for the wardrobe of the busy intelligence agency head. She starts spotting on Tuesday, loses the pregnancy by Thursday. She forgets to cancel the appointment.

Every one of Steve’s small kindnesses, the way he asks if she wants some kind of service (with tentative care in his eyes: “I think it’s something I could do with too”), the touch of his unconscious hand on her back in the dark of their bedroom - all of it says _Lean on me_. But Peggy can’t bring herself to do that. She wants answers for her anger, but has not even yet found the questions.

She has not deluded herself into thinking that Steve blames her in any way: his anger at himself is clear on his face, clear in the way he goes running at dawn or in the dead of night, long runs that are so punishing even for him that he is still sweating when he returns to her. He has been direct about it, too, earnestly trying after the second time to shoulder the responsibility with talk about how things had happened the way he had known them: another husband, children without this sort of heartbreak. She had been just as vehement that he surely hadn’t gotten into the details of it all, that he didn’t know what he didn’t know. She blames herself enough for both of them, anyway.

The doctor has said that they should hold off on trying any more for now. Apparently three miscarriages in a row, including one well into the second trimester, do not exactly make her a star patient. He had offered to fit her for a new diaphragm.

Peggy’s been stubborn before, privileged her own counsel over that of professionals, but this time she listens. She isn’t certain she could stand trying again, regardless.

* * *

They drive into the city to watch Bucky graduate from university five weeks after the third time, four weeks after she returns to work. Steve suggested that they cancel, but Peggy has been shoving them back toward normalcy so relentlessly that she essentially ignores the remark. The trip is quiet, Peggy in the driver’s seat. She wears a favorite dress of hers, navy with crimson piping. It settles over her curves in horribly familiar ways, as if there had never been a time when it didn’t. She takes care to coordinate her nails, shoes, and the sunglasses she wears to move between the buildings of City College. The commencement itself takes place in a soaringly large hall. She gives every indication of listening attentively to the speaker, though afterward she would have to look at the program to see who it had been.

Winifred had invited them over for refreshments following the ceremony. Becca, who has mentioned more than once - to her mother, to her sister, quiet and tactful - that she’s happy to have the morning away while her husband cares for the children, takes the steps of her childhood home in twos and opens her arms to her infant son before the door has finished closing.

Peggy had once held a Proctor baby with little thought. Now she can barely look at one.

“Let me put on the kettle,” she says numbly, and strides past without glancing aside.

She has to check three times to make sure that she’s done it properly, that she remembered the water and to turn on the gas and light the flame. Sitting at the kitchen table, she berates herself for it, for not even being able to do something as simple as this, something that’s been done a thousand times before with no bother throughout history.

When the footsteps approach, she wipes her eyes hastily and says, “I’ll just be a moment, Steve,” before she even thinks to confirm that it’s actually her husband.

“I think you might be a bit longer than that.” Winifred steps into her kitchen, glancing at the water heating on the stovetop. She steps around Peggy’s chair and goes to a cupboard, sliding her hand behind a stack of plates until she’s found a tin. She seats herself beside Peggy and places the tin in the center of the table, popping off the lid as she does.

“Eat,” she says, pressing a shell-shaped chocolate biscuit into Peggy’s hand.

Peggy isn’t precisely in the mood, but she breaks off a corner and puts it into her mouth for the sake of politeness. It’s a bit soft for her taste, but still has good flavor. She breaks off another small piece.

“When I ask you this,” Winifred says slowly, “I want you to truly take your time in answering, hmm, Margaret?” She might be the only person since Peggy’s own mother to call her by her full name, but to Winifred, Bucky will always be James, her daughters are Josephine and Rebecca, never Josie and Becca, and she refuses to call Steve anything but Steven even though his name is meant to be Grant anyway. From her, Margaret seems a badge of honor.

“Of course,” says Peggy.

Winifred levels a look at her. “How are you feeling?” she asks.

Peggy responds, “Fine,” with what even she realizes is excessive haste. Winifred says patiently, “Would you like to try again?”

The kettle begins to whistle and Peggy stands to take it from the heat. She manages to turn off the flame, but seems to get stuck afterward. She stands at the stove, her back to Winifred and the kettle still in her hand. “I’m sad,” she says, staring at the wall. “I’m terribly sad, and I’m angry as well.”

“At whom?”

“At the doctor, for not being able to do anything and for having no advice at all that might help. At all the people in this world who have living children and mistreat them or ignore them or don’t even realize precisely the value of what they have. At Steve, for putting himself through the serum and all that time...away, without thinking about what might come of it. And mostly at myself. For being unfair to all of those people. For thinking I could somehow manage to do it all. For not being able to do this thing that women have been doing while they were still living in caves. For letting myself—” Her voice splinters, fades, and she gasps for a moment to regain herself. “For letting myself be _hopeful_.”

She almost forgets that Winifred is there; all she hears is the murmur of voices in the front room. Then: “Well, that’s not quite how I felt afterward, but it’s perfectly understandable.”

Peggy turns, just mindful enough to set the kettle back on the stove to avoid flinging it about. Winifred has a biscuit on the scrubbed table in front of her, untouched. She is looking calmly back at Peggy, who swallows.

“It happened to you as well?”

Winifred takes a moment before she speaks. “George and I had been married five months. I went visiting at my mother’s house, and she teased me, saying that the women in our family were usually mothers before the first year was out and I was running out of time. She had something of a bawdy sense of humor, my mother, and her mother had been a midwife, so discussing these things was something of a matter of course.

“And I told her that actually, my monthly had just come, late and heavier than usual, so she would just have to wait for a first grandchild. She went very still, and then she spoke to me in a gentler way than she usually did. She knew that I had wanted the baby, that George had good prospects and that we had been saving for it.

“And I kept thinking it was strange, for months, how I could be sad about something I hadn’t even realized was there, hadn’t even realized myself was gone. But then I had James, and Josephine, and it faded, at least a little.

“Josephine was three and a bit, the second time. I had gone to the church to light a few candles - the children were with my sister - but I found myself absolutely worn out when I arrived, so I sat for a moment to catch my breath. I looked at our pretty church windows, and I said a small prayer, health and safety for my family, my children. And I was about to ask special for the babe, when Sister Thomasine, perhaps the oldest nun I’ve ever seen, passed by and came into the pew behind me. She touched my shoulder and said softly in my ear, “Have you money for a doctor, Mrs. Barnes, or shall I help you to your mother’s?” and I realized I had blood coming down my leg.”

Peggy tries to reach for the protective casing which has allowed her to smile through the most dreadful parts of undercover work, to push through worry for her comrades in a firefight. It crumbles away from her, and all she can remember is the way she too had seen the blood appear, bold and sudden and terrifying, and had known immediately that there was no returning from it. She does not know if she will ever be able to recount it with such calm and such detail.

Winifred’s voice drops. “And then, of course, there was Elizabeth.”

Steve told her about Elizabeth Barnes. She had gotten some type of cancer at age three. At the time, there was nothing to be done. She died when Becca was seven, Josie thirteen, and Bucky fourteen. They’d called her Bitty.

“He really loved her,” Steve had said. “They all did. It nearly broke them when she died.”

Peggy meets Winifred’s eyes. That kind of pain deserves a witness.

The older woman touches at the corners of her mouth with a careful finger as if she is checking that her lipstick is still in place. Her hand trembles slightly. “It was a terrible thing,” she says with quiet and weighty deliberation in each word. “A terrible thing, losing a child, even when they were barely more than an idea of a future to me. But it is also something that connects so many of us. We don’t speak of it, but it’s there nevertheless, and it can happen to anyone: grateful for it or broken by it, rich or poor, the best doctors in the world or none at all. It happened to me when I had perhaps two coins in my pocket, it could happen to that pretty young queen of yours in her palace. Sometimes it is only chance, Margaret.” She sighs and goes to put the untouched biscuit back in the tin, snapping the lid firmly back on. “I try to see the terrible fairness in that. I try to find the good in it, I do. It makes me more forgiving of the children I have, even when I’m angry with them or disagree with the choices they’ve made in their own lives.”

It is clear that she is referring to Josie. It’s apparent to the whole family that she’s found the life she wants, between her teaching and going home to Violet at night, and that if she ever marries a man it will be her giving in to something outside herself. No one mentions it.

Peggy turns back around, preparing the teapot with the slightly cooled water from the kettle. She brings it over to the table and sits across from Winifred. “I don’t know that I can find the good in it,” she says, a quiet confession. “This has made me feel a stranger to myself. I have seen people die - many of them, many good people, sometimes terribly - and I was able to walk on with those memories and do my work. I was never the sort to play dolls or plan names for my children and now the idea of never holding a child of my own seems the most heartbreaking fate. But I find myself without a child and with all of these unfamiliar parts of myself, all of this knowledge that I don’t know what to do with.”

Winifred stands and replaces the tin in the cupboard, takes down the teacups although they are slightly higher than a comfortable reach for her. When she returns, she pours them each a cup of less than steaming tea; they each sip it uncomplainingly. “Your feelings are your own, of course,” she says finally. “But think of this, too, Margaret. Perhaps some of that new knowledge could be that you have more love to give than you would have thought, and that it will always find somewhere to go, even if it isn’t a child grown in your own womb.”

Peggy says nothing in response. She drinks her tea down to the dregs, until she is finally ready to return to sit with the rest of the family.

* * *

Steve is already waiting out by the car by the time Peggy has said her goodbyes and come out with a soda bread that she could not refuse. He wraps his arms around her waist and pulls her toward him. His hands marry themselves behind her back and he holds her securely, ignoring the loaf between them. They lean against the car door. When Steve finally speaks, she can feel the vibration of it surrounding her.

“You two were in the kitchen for a while.” He rests his cheek on her hair. “I’m glad that you found someone to talk to, someone who probably has more experience than I do. But Peg, when I promised in sickness and health and all the rest, I meant it. I’m right here.”

She presses her mouth to the vulnerable space at the base of his throat. “I’ve never doubted it,” she says, and although her voice is quiet, she knows that he hears her. “I only had some doubt in myself that I needed to talk through.”

“Hmm.” They have been standing for a while. No doubt people are peering at them through the windows. Peggy waits to hear what Steve will say. “If that happens again, will you tell me? I think I can be pretty persuasive on the topic.”

She smiles against him. “I think we’re safe for now, but I’ll keep that in mind.”

She rests on him for several more long moments before they climb into the car. Steve drives home while she watches out the window, dozing a little but also thinking.

There’s something else she is keeping in mind: the SHIELD librarian is accustomed to wide-ranging research questions from her. Nearly anything will be regarded as relating to some case or other. If she puts in a request for information on adoption in New Jersey, it will not be taken amiss.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Like most things I write, this was directly influenced by Melina Marchetta. I reread chapter 39 of Quintana as I was writing it. If you see tear stains on your screen, that's why.
> 
> I know people have been wondering about how all the kids came to be a part of the family, and this is the beginning of that. One of the reasons it took this long is that I've slightly written myself into a corner. What was meant to be the second chapter of this fic is one I think of as being titled "The Kids." It covers all four adoptions, plus some early childhood stuff. It's almost done and has been for a while, except that I'm stymied by some stuff close to the end. It's things I need to take care with, so I think it's good to be slow about it, but I also _wanted_ to start writing about this period, without treading on ground that would be covered by what I've already written. But I realized that "The Kids" is mostly from Steve's perspective, and that especially on such a personal topic, Peggy deserved a voice too.
> 
> A couple of resources I looked at when considering miscarriage in the earlier part of the twentieth century when Winifred would have been pregnant, versus Peggy in the midcentury period, while keeping in mind the levels of societal class to which they are party in this 'verse:
> 
>   * [From Hazard to Blessing to Tragedy: Representations of Miscarriage in Twentieth-Century America](https://www-jstor-org.ezproxy.bu.edu/stable/3178514?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents) by Leslie J. Reagan
>   * The Dig podcast episode [Miscarriage in Nineteenth Century America](https://digpodcast.org/2019/02/10/miscarriage-nineteenth-century-america/)
> 



	18. 1998

“The party’s downstairs, you know.”

“Well, I’m up here, so—” Tony sips audibly from his champagne glass, spreads his arms wide. “I think the party’s actually up here now.”

He watches as his godfather walks across the gallery toward him. Uncle Steve wears a tux pretty well for an older guy, especially one who’s always preferred the comforts of home to a night out. Probably all those years of being Aunt Peg’s plus one. There’s still something strong about his carriage, a reassuring lack of hesitancy to his step, even though he has quite a few more wrinkles than he did during Tony’s childhood.

Steve stops beside him and looks up at the piece too. “See how the waves look like fingers?” He traces his own through the air to draw attention to them, as if Tony hadn’t noticed their ever-reaching grasp. He takes down the last of the champagne.

“They’re going to bring out the cake soon,” Uncle Steve finally continues when they’ve been standing in silent artistic contemplation for a while. “Your mom is going to notice that you’re gone when you’re not there to sing Happy Birthday to her. Robin might have noticed already.”

“Yeah,” says Tony absently. He almost wants to touch the painted screen in front of them, although even he, who had ducked unconcernedly past the ropes blocking off the stairs to the Met’s upper floors, holds himself firm against giving in to the instinct. His mind finds its way back to itself after a minute and he asks, “How did you know I was here?”

“You didn’t really seem in an Arms and Armor mood earlier.”

Tony’s face twitches as if it can’t decide whether to smile. “You like Robin, don’t you?” he asks instead.

“I always have,” says Steve in that easy, honest way of his. “Everyone’s glad to see her. She managed all of Rose’s questions without running, and I think Layla still wants to adopt her.” He takes in the details of the waves once more before he turns to look precisely at Tony. “But the real question is, do you like Robin? Because if you want to go through with giving her that ring you have in your pocket, you should probably be sure.”

The box, when he automatically pats at his pants, is just where it’s been each time he’s checked it tonight.

“Guess one of the grandkids found you a Super Detective magnifying glass in a cereal box,” he says to cover up the way he’s been caught off guard.

“No,” says Steve. “I know it’s been a few decades, but I once carried around a box just like that, waiting for the right moment.”

“Aunt Peggy says that she was the one who popped the question,” Tony points out.

“Well, there’s a reason we don’t listen to everything she says.” The smile gives just that little extra crinkle to his eyes. “Only most things.”

Tony lets out a little sound that doesn’t quite make it beyond the beginnings of a laugh. “You know that my—” He clears his throat, looks over toward the display without paying attention to it. “My first date with Robin was maybe three weeks after Dad died? We’d known each other a little at school and I’d seen her when I was in Boston a couple months before, so when I heard she was in town, I set it up…And I wasn’t—I wasn’t ready for any of it. I’d just been handed my father’s life’s work, I was trying to make sure Mom was managing, everything was starting with Jarvis. I was sure it was going to be a disaster. But that night at dinner, I had fun. She was fun. We could just talk - about her latest coding project or the Three Laws of Robotics, whatever.”

“And has it stopped being fun?” Steve’s head is tilted just a little, casual, patient, as if he already knows what Tony is going to say. Tony swallows and says it anyway.

“I don’t know if it ever really got past fun.” He thinks of the two of them yesterday evening. Robin had been fizzy after the train trip down from Boston, the way she always was. She’s the only person Tony knows over the age of five who regards trains as anything more exciting than a convenient way to get from here to there. They’d gone to a little burger place they liked (made the world’s most perfect steak fries and served them up in overflowing baskets), got into another good-natured debate over the implications of human cloning, stopped by to see if his mother needed any more help before the party, and went back to his place. It _had_ been fun. It had been a good time.

“She’s sharp as hell, and that punk rock thing definitely does it for me." He risks a glance over, waiting for his godfather to clear his throat awkwardly the way he does when Tony brings up anything sex adjacent, but Uncle Steve is still watching him with that quiet, patient look. Tony finds that as he continues, he cannot look back. "Things are great when she’s here. But I don't think she knows what it would be like to be a Stark all the time, what it would be like to be married to someone who’s a part of that. Would she change for it? Would I like her the way I do if she did?” Tony wants to put his hands in his pockets despite the box taking up real estate in there, but he is still holding the champagne flute and the darkened gallery is not exactly bustling with passing waiters balancing conveniently extended trays.

“People change all the time,” Steve points out, and instead of a rising fury at the triteness of the statement, the calm around the man, Tony finds his tension beginning to unravel in response. There’s something soothing about the lack of surprise, a peaceful cushioning inside of him. It’s as if they are discussing theory, like they are back on the floor of his childhood bedroom, Steve sitting through another of Tony’s exhaustive explanations of his latest Rube Goldberg machine.

In that sort of space, even though his voice creaks as he speaks, he says, “I don’t know if I’d want her to change for me. But I don't think I'd change for her either."

“Then why are you trying to propose?”

"Gotta try to find your person, you know?" He runs a finger around the edge of his glass, looks back over. "Dad always said he regretted not finding Mom sooner. I'm trying my best here. "

"But if he had met her sooner," Steve reminds him, "I don't know that he would have been the right person for her." He shifts, and Tony remembers that however straight-postured the man stands, he's also a million years old and been on his feet all night. He's about to suggest that they go take a seat, but Steve pins him with a stare. "I've been luckier in this area than I can believe, luckier than you can understand, but I'll tell you that I knew when I had found my person. And all of these doubts you have, Tony, it sounds as if you haven't yet."

In some ways it is a relief to hear it outside of the suppressed corner of his own mind, to have the words brought into the open air with no condemnation in the tone. In others, it is as if Steve has swung the door wide and invited in all of Tony’s fears.

He can’t speak for a minute. When he does, his words are slow.

"I have this memory," he says. "I must have been really young - I don't even know if it's actually real or something my brain just pieced together. You'd brought the whole gang up to the Maine place for Christmas - no idea why, we could have all been snowed in and died - but that's where we were. And then Dad and Aunt Peggy got called somewhere and disappeared for a few days, made it back just in time for Christmas Day. I was under the kitchen table and you were cooking when they got back, and she came in to say hi to you. She just—She gave you a kiss and you whispered something to her, and she touched your cheek. Didn't really do anything, just put a hand there and looked at you. And you know, I was probably too young to know anything, but I knew that you loved each other."

Steve is quiet. "It was real. You remembered it right," he says finally, a little huskiness to his words, as if this decades-old memory is still entirely fresh for him

"No way you could have been like that in the beginning," Tony says, abrupt bravado covering the vulnerability. "I've heard all those old war stories. But you had _something_ and you grew into it together. So why can't I—Why can’t we try to grow together like that?"

"You _can_ , Tony.” Steve turns to him fully, resting a hand on his shoulder. “You can. But you have to want it.” In the dim light of the spot aimed at the artwork in front of them, he can read his godfather’s eyes: not solemnity or reproach, but hope for him, whatever he chooses.

He clears his throat, clears it again. “Might be that I want to want it more than I actually do.”

He thinks of Ana calling Jarvis pet names, fluttering her lashes at him as they passed in the hallway so that he stuttered and blushed. He thinks of his parents coming home from some event or another, his father’s suit coat around his mother’s shoulders. He thinks of the people who have been raised beside him as family: the Barnes’s, a carefully expanding unit, the Carters with their spouses and children and deeply committed friends.

He thinks of Aunt Peggy’s hand on Steve’s cheek all those years ago.

“Someday,” he says, a promise in a way he doesn’t entirely understand. “Someday I’ll really want it.”

“You will,” Steve says back with such certainty that Tony lets out a breath. “But for now, we should go back downstairs. We’ve been gone for a while.”

Tony waits until Steve turns, then follows him toward the doorway. “Aunt Peg will have definitely noticed we disappeared by now.”

“Who do you think told me that I should come look for you?” Uncle Steve smiles over his shoulder, hands in his pockets.

“Only right most of the time, huh?”

“Don’t tell her.”

And Tony smiles too, and shakes his head, and walks down to stand with his family and eat cake.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tony and Steve are looking at Ogata Kōrin's [Rough Waves](https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/44918?&searchField=All&sortBy=Relevance&deptids=6&high=on&ft=*&offset=0&rpp=80&;pos=46).
> 
> Just a heads up: the next six weeks or so are pretty hectic for me (we're heading into the holiday season) so I'm not sure what my posting schedule is going to be like. Saying this might now reverse jinx me and I'll post on time every week, but fair warning just in case I'm not able to. (And sorry to potentially leave off on such a meh chapter.)


	19. 1977

He wakes up alone that morning. The note that Peggy’s stuck to the bathroom mirror reminds him that she’ll bring Emma and Drea with her after work. (They’d already discussed this together last night, dreamy and worn out as they curled beside each other, but she might have thought him too close to sleep to have remembered.) _Perhaps Eric too,_ she’s written, a hastily added postscript even though it’s above the signature. Emma had mentioned that they were back together, and no matter how much Peggy had been encouraged by their breakup after high school graduation, Steve has the feeling that it will stick this time. It’s fine with him; Eric is a nice person, and Steve doesn’t doubt that Emma will live her life and find success whether they’re together or not. Staying with her high school sweetheart won’t limit that.

He doesn’t technically have work himself - he'd been called in on Saturday, and was taken off the schedule for today in exchange despite his protestations - but if he slides into the office around 10, Bella will be shut up doing budgeting and he can tuck himself away without being noticed. He needs the distraction.

Nate’s already down in the kitchen when he gets there, although he’d finished with school yesterday and doesn’t really need to be up either. He’s hunched over a book at the table but glances up when Steve enters.

“Food on the stove,” he says, removing the fork he has stuck absently in his mouth. The plate already on the table in front of him has the remnants of his own portion of scrambled eggs, along with traces of the strawberry jam he likes to mix in with them. It’s a good thing Emma isn’t here yet: she thinks it’s a sin.

Steve brushes a kiss to his head on the way past. “Thanks,” he says, going to fill a plate. They’re all used to Steve’s metabolism: Nate left probably eight eggs worth in the pan despite his own teenaged appetite. He sits down across from his son, whose nose is back in his book, another one of the science fiction novels he loves. Nate isn’t a fast reader - he spends a lot of time thinking about what he’s reading, taking in the words, their implications, what it all means - but he is steady and voracious. His bookshelves upstairs are lined with carefully cracked paperback spines, slotted in one at a time as he finishes them.

“What are you up to today?” Steve asks.

Nate finishes his page and looks up, blinking, though more from leaving another world than from the bright sunlight filling the kitchen. “There was a problem at the printer and they didn’t get the yearbooks done in time to sign them in school, so we’re all going to Nancy Taylor’s house to do it there instead. Then we have graduation ceremony rehearsal at the school anyway, so we’ll probably go over there all together.”

“Sounds good.” Steve focuses on forking up more eggs. Of all of his children, Nate would probably best accept his tearing up over the thought of these kids spending one last assured day together before they all go their separate ways, but it’s a little early for him to start falling apart.

* * *

The work distraction is actually fairly successful. With Mary Alice’s retirement, his caseload has increased, and he manages to lose himself in files and phone calls for most of the day. He doesn’t even notice that he’s worked through lunch until Bella, finished wrangling the budget for now and in a mood from the effort, tells him loudly that even if he is going to ignore both her instructions and official regulations, he isn’t going to starve while he does it. He gives a token protest, but ends up biting ravenously through a couple of sandwiches as he stops at red lights on the way across town for a home visit he’d been able to hastily set up.

It’s actually easy to check his personal life at the door when he’s talking to families, to the kids he works with. His feelings can matter later; it’s the job that he needs to focus on now.

He’s surprised when he returns to the car and finds that it’s 4 PM. By the time he has gone back home, changed clothes, and driven over to the school, it’s about forty-five minutes to the start of the ceremony. Sliding his hands into his pockets, he sets off across the grass of the sports field where they have set up a small stage and seating all around. Back when Rose and Drea had graduated, the school had chosen to use the auditorium, but Steve guesses that the weather today was too fine to resist. The temperature has dropped from its peak of several hours ago, and a breeze brushes through his hair.

He stakes out seats, making sure to get an extra for Eric just in case. He sees some people he recognizes: parents and siblings who he’s run into around town or at past school functions for Nate and the girls, Nate’s old English teacher Mrs. Krentz, who comes over to gush praise again even though she retired last year. He tries to store away the details of it all to tell Bucky about in their next phone call; Libby will be graduating in just a couple of years. (Buck will probably have another one of his good-natured breakdowns when it happens, starting off with mentioning how _young_ most of the other graduates’ parents are.) Mostly, though, he sits and waits.

Drea finds him first. There’s a looseness to her spine, a grin on her face, as she walks across the grass, says, “Hi, Dad!” and wraps her arms around him. Though she likes school and he can see the little smile that lives at the corners of her mouth even when she is simply telling people where she’s at college, there’s a feeling each time they drive up to Cambridge that she is constructing defenses, restructuring herself in some way. All of that is gone today. She’s wearing a belted denim dress - she never went in for Emma’s long florals, or the sorts of busy patterns and fire-bright colors that Rose prefers - and she’s gotten her hair cut since he last saw her. It’s just a couple of inches, but he smoothes a hand over it as they embrace.

“It’s good to see you,” he says quietly. “I know Nate’s looking forward to it.” The day Nate had called with the date of the graduation, Drea had circled it on her calendar while he was still on the phone (“In red, Nate, I promise”) and when they’d hung up, Steve watched him smiling with unconscious excitement. It’s not that he mopes around, whining over being left behind as his sisters have gone off one by one, and it’s not that he loves Emma and Rose less, but it’s still unfamiliar to him, being apart from Drea.

“I guess I could stand to see him,” Drea says, shrugging, but she is smiling too.

Peggy comes up behind Drea as she is pulling away. Emma and Eric are with her, Em’s hand tucked into Eric’s back pocket. Peggy catches Steve’s eye as he takes that in, raising an eyebrow and pulling her mouth just barely to the side. Steve covers a grin by dipping to kiss her cheek.

“Lovely group of seats,” she says innocuously as Steve turns to greet the other two.

They all settle in beside each other. Peggy always likes the aisle seat - quick egress - and Drea slides in after her, Emma and Eric next, and Steve bracketing the other end. Emma talks about her summer courses. Drea tells stories about Tony’s antics, the mischief he’d gotten into as he tried to prevent her from leaving even for just a few days; she’s obviously charmed by that in a way that Steve isn’t sure he would be.

The seats fill up around them, chattering relatives and friends, staff members. It is almost time.

The crickets are starting to chirp, but Pomp and Circumstance drowns them out, the high schoolers in the band clearly putting their all into it. The graduates enter in twos, each member of the pairs representing one of the school colors. Nate walks with Jillian Lee. Nate went out with Jilly on a couple of occasions, but not much came of it as far as Steve knows. She is standing very straight and walking steadily, wearing a respectable green cap and gown. Nate is stuck in the version that’s meant to be the corresponding gold but looks instead like unfortunate mustard. The robe doesn’t even fit him right, slightly too short above the ankle and draping loosely over his bony shoulders, but he manages to pull it off just through his own lack of perturbation over those facts. 

As the last of the graduates file into their seats and the band silences their instruments, Drea intones quietly, “Guests, faculty, scholars,” anticipating Principal Connor’s traditional, pompous opening. After a bit of microphone feedback, he echoes her precisely, and Steve, smiling and shaking his head, angles himself to begin translating the words for Emma and Eric. Em places a hand on his after only three sentences.

“This speech - I think I can quote all of it now.”

Steve looks up at the stage. Principal Connor raises a finger in the air to emphasize a phrase. “That’s new,” Steve points out. Em rolls her eyes.

“Only one more time,” she says, hands weighty and mouth parted to emphasize the exhaustion of it all.

“Only one more time,” Steve repeats, the words coming slow and numbed on his fingers. He feels a little stricken and barely manages a smile for her.

The valedictorian and salutatorian speak one after the other. It’s obvious that they, at least, have written new speeches of their own: the words of triumph and hope, of lessons learned and more to come, might be cliche, but they are still somehow new. Even if he’s heard nearly the same sentiments at the girls’ graduations, for these kids, they are only just discovered.

When it is Nate’s turn to walk across the stage, he does it with a firm step and his family cheering loudly from the crowd. Steve, applauding hard, can’t even tell if he can pick them out in the audience, but he watches Nate raise his diploma in the air with a smile on his face and is certain that it’s meant for them. It is that same smile Steve knows so well, that peaceful, open-armed upturn of the mouth that Nate has displayed since childhood. Sometimes Steve thinks that Nate was born smiling like that, that this was the way he greeted the world on his first moment in it. He’ll never know if he’s right - that first smile belonged to someone else - but he has a lifetime of Nate’s smiles saved up and that’s something that not many people have.

As Melvin Casper is called next and they all sit back down, he and Peggy catch eyes, even down the row from one another. Despite the smile he gives her, she tilts her head, closes her eyes in an understanding blink which she holds for a beat longer than usual. _I know_ , it seems to say, but also, _How lucky have we been?_

There’s a bit of a debate regarding the pictures. Nate fights his way through the crowd to find them with Emma and Peggy in the middle of a standoff over whether Eric should be included in the family photos and Steve and Drea are trying to make polite, distracting smalltalk with the man in question.

“Eric can take four, five,” Nate compromises calmly, “and then we’ll find someone to take some with him.” He searches around for a moment, then raises his voice. “Ricky! Hey, Rick, come over here for a minute.”

Ricky Blake, cap in hand, has been standing nearby, taking his own turn to greet Mrs. Krentz. He glances over at the Carters, at Nate and his beckoning hand, and excuses himself.

“What’s up?” he asks as he walks over, and Steve notices that he’s lost the awkward sort of meticulousness to the way he does the sign. He does it confidently now, casually, even if he doesn’t quite have the accompanying mouth movement down. 

Eric actually has a good, artistic eye and arranges them all so that Nate is the center of the photos without throwing his shadow onto the rest of them.

When they’re finished, Steve goes to reclaim the camera.

“How are you, Ricky?” He puts out a hand to shake. “Congratulations.”

“Thanks, Mr. C.” A grin spreads across Ricky’s face as he grasps Steve’s hand enthusiastically. Even when Steve first met him, he was slightly bigger than average for a kid his age. Now Steve looks firmly up at him; he’s probably six and a half feet tall, and solid across. His graduation gown, unzipped in front by this point, has clearly been altered to fit him. He looks around. "Rose couldn't come?" He's always had a bit of a fascination with Rosie.

"No, she wasn't able to take the time off of work. She'll call tonight."

"Too bad."

“Did you decide on your plans for next year?” Steve asks. The last time they spoke, a few months ago, Ricky was still considering whether he wanted to end up at GW like Nate. He’d laid out the entire pro-con list while leaning against the counter watching Steve make carrot cake and waiting for Nate to finish getting ready for the concert they were going to.

“I’ll be staying in state,” Ricky replies, and though Steve is watching closely, his smile does not slip, the light in his eyes does not dim. “Maryland has a better education program anyway, for undergraduates at least.”

Steve can feel his eyebrows jump up. “Education?”

“Yeah.” Ricky glances back over his shoulder. “I was just telling Mrs. Krentz. I want to be an English teacher.”

“You’re going to be great at it,” Steve says with confidence. He doesn’t bother asking how Earl Blake took this news.

“Thanks, Mr. C.” Ricky looks down at the ground and then back up. He fiddles with the tassel on the cap he is still holding. He clears his throat. “I just—I wanted to tell you how much you helped me. You’re a good listener, and—um, it was important to me, to watch you with your kids or talking about your work. So, thank you. I just wanted you to know.”

For a moment, Steve can't say anything. Finally, he manages to speak. "I don't think I did much," he says with soft feeling, "but if I did, it was my pleasure."

There's always a bit of a wrench watching Ricky go back to rejoin his family. He's taller even than his father now, but there's still a little stiffening to Ricky's shoulders when they are near each other. Tim, still only just gaining some height of his own, shifts to stand beside his brother.

He thinks about how everyone still calls him Ricky, a child's name. He could have grown up into a Rich or a Richard by now, but he hasn’t. Perhaps he will never make the change. Or perhaps it just isn’t time yet: how easy it is to see Ricky and Nate and all the others on this day, at the top of a climb, and to think that it is all over. Maybe he should try to remember that it is only just beginning.

Peggy is leaning against his chest, his arm around her, before he even fully registers her there.

"We've done well, haven't we," she says, looking over at the children with pride, and he nods against her and kisses her hair.

"More to come?" he asks, a little waver in his voice, and she looks up at him, surprised.

"Of course," she says, taking his hand. "Always."

The custodial staff is beginning to come in to fold up the chairs. It is time to go.

"I want to finish telling Mom something," Drea says as they head over to the parking lot. "I'll ride with her."

Emma has her bag in Peggy's car, so she and Eric decide to join them as well. Steve squeezes Peggy's hand, still in his. She looks up at him fondly. Em's as stubborn as she is, and clearly trying out her version of exposure therapy. It's a good thing that Eric's a good sport.

"What about the man of the hour?" Peggy asks, looking over at their son. "Are you certain you don't want a nice dinner out?"

"I told you what I wanted," Nate says. Steve has the lasagna already prepared to go into the oven as soon as they get home. Every restaurant in town will be crowded tonight anyway, but that's not the reason Nate chose it. "And I'll ride over with Dad."

Peggy's parked farther in. She parts from Steve with one last squeeze of the hand and a "See you in a moment." Nate and Steve walk over to Steve's car together.

"How are you feeling?" Steve asks.

Nate takes in a deep breath of the night air. "Really good. Proud. Excited. Tired, a little, too." He looks over at his father. "How are you feeling?"

"Good. Proud of you." Steve repeats. "A little sad that this part of things is over."

"Sure," Nate says easily. "But there are other parts. And I want you there for all of those. We all do."

Steve looks over at him. “You ready for what comes next?” he asks.

Nate stretches his hands up toward the slowly darkening sky, fingers spread on one, diploma still held tightly in the other. “Course I am,” he says. The departing crowd is loud, all shouts and laughter and car engines, Nate’s voice quiet even in its surety, but Steve hears it anyway. He would hear it anywhere.

He looks at his youngest, taller than he is now by a half inch, maybe a bit more. It’s clear that Drea and Nate have height in their genes. His slim build, the lankiness of his limbs, just makes him look even taller, but he’s never seemed awkward with it. Nate always just puts one foot in front of the other, attentive about it but confident too, trusting that he’s placed himself on solid ground.

“Course you are,” he agrees. Under the beginnings of the slimming moon, he puts an arm around his son’s shoulders, pulls him close, and holds tight.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Are weeknight graduations a thing? We always had ours on Sunday but maybe that's a modern/Jewish school thing. Anyway, all the videos of 1977 graduations I found on Youtube had them on weeknights, so it's Wednesday here.
> 
> My youngest brother started high school this year and it's making me feel like singing the longest ever version of _Sunrise, Sunset_ while also looking in the mirror a la Jamie Lee Curtis in Freaky Friday ("I'm old! Oh, I'm like the Cryptkeeper!"). So this is some top level projection - but also makes sense for Steve in this moment as someone who's very aware of time, and was so involved in raising the children. Whatever, I'm going with it!
> 
> Oh also, just realized that I for sure just quoted Matthew Rhys in his 2018 Emmy speech. What are you gonna do?


	20. 2018

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Heads up for MAJOR CHARACTER DEATH. In the best way possible, I suppose, but still.

In this life, Peggy does not die in a nursing home with Steve hundreds of miles away. She dies with him right beside her. As he eases himself onto the bed with her, he can distantly register Rose admonishing the home health nurse that they’ve been married, “Probably longer than you’ve been _alive_ ,” and that if someone wants to stop them being together right now, they’ll have to arrest Rose to do it.

Rosie has always been a little much.

He is on his side, holding Peggy. He tries to remember all the many times he’s done this before: with the television on or while they read together in bed, the first time she let him put his arms around her after the loss of the first baby, collapsed into exhaustion next to each other from a day of taking care of skinned knees and hurt feelings and the entire world besides, talking with heads bent close about the day or the kids or some small joke that only they can appreciate. He does not even shy from thinking about her tears against his neck after another trip sitting in the hospital, as if she could give in only here in the close-held dark, not even in the privacy of the kitchen. He tries to remember all that time they had: months and years building into decades, a longer life for Peggy than before, even.

All he can feel is her slowing heartbeat beneath his palm.

When she speaks, even her voice is fragile. He does not try to think of the way it used to be, firm and compassionate, the little twinkle in it. That Peggy still lives inside this one, a seed which bloomed into his wife, and he loves all of it, all of her. “It was good, wasn’t it, my darling?”

“It was—” He clears his throat. “It was the best.”

“Hmm.” She does not ask about regrets. She did once, but she must have been convinced along the way, must be convinced by the here and now. Their family overflows the room. Nate already has tears coming down his face, and Rosie is clenching her jaw against them. Emma between the collection of siblings, in-laws, and assorted children and her parents, and signs a collective, “Let’s go,” before starting to usher everyone out the door. The nurse breathes a sigh of relief and seats herself in a chair, a book sitting unread on her lap beneath her folded hands. She tilts her head back a little. Her tight ponytail makes the lines of exhaustion obvious on her face.

Steve presses his face to Peggy’s hair. “Save me a dance, huh?”

There’s no sound when she laughs, nothing wheezing or trembling thinly into the air. He feels it against him in the movement of her shoulders, her spine. “Perhaps I want to give someone else a turn.”

“Not a chance.”

“Well then, Captain.” She tenses, holding back a cough. He rubs a hand on her back, careful, where it can’t be seen. He doesn’t catch the nurse’s eye and ask for the medication Peggy had so adamantly denied. When she speaks again, her words are so quiet even he can barely make them out. “I know there are still some things to be done around here, but don’t take more time than you need, will you? I’ll be waiting.” She closes her eyes.

She does not die that day, but on one like it not too far on. He stays and he holds her until there’s no heartbeat to feel at all.

* * *

Steve still carries Peggy’s coffin. It weighs more heavily on him in some ways, and less in others. He still cries, and he doesn’t have to look over his shoulder to know that his kids are crying too. 

It’s smaller, this funeral. It is not in London. Steve recognizes every person there. Two full rows are taken up by family or those close enough to it. He sees Tony take Pepper’s hand and thinks about Peggy tossing over her shoulder at the end of a lunch together, “And please see if you can find a place for Aldrich Killian’s assistant, Anthony. I saw her during a meeting last week. She has talent, and it’s being buried by all the time she’s forced to spend fending him off.”

He knows that people expect him to speak. Rose, jotting notes for the program, had written his name at the top of the page before Nate pointed out that Peggy had left specific instructions for the service, and she had expressly asked Steve not to give a eulogy.

He had loved her so much in that moment, an eclipsing amount. Without her word, he would have done it, would have done it because it was his duty and because she deserved him to. Even if he had to pin his spine straight to make it through, even if he would surely have destroyed himself trying to fit her into small words and stories that could never be enough.

He treasures what the kids say, though. Rose is supposed to go first, but she stays put in the front row, arms clenched against her chest as she catches in sharp breaths. Drea squeezes Jackson’s hand, then her sister’s, and walks to the front to start instead.

“I used to debate my mother at the kitchen table,” she begins. “It was just practice, but there’s a reason I did so well when it wasn’t.”

Steve can picture it so strongly, even without his daughter’s words: Peggy sipping gently from a cup of tea, switching between the pro and con positions on nearly any topic with ease. The way Drea celebrated when she delivered an argument well, when she countered one of Peggy’s points or kept her voice firm even when thrown off. She hadn’t noticed the way Peggy had smiled during those kitchen table victories, hadn’t been able to see the way Peggy applauded when they attended all of those speech and debate tournaments, but he had.

Without asking, Emma stands next and Millie follows. Em is very poised, Steve thinks. It has been so long, too long, since he saw her speak in public like this, and he is so proud. Emma talks about how her mother taught her to stand up for herself, how to be graceful about it but unyielding too. After so many years, Millie interprets with ease and fluency specific to Emma. Her voice never wavers as it flows over the audience. As she steps down behind Emma and Steve catches her eye, he sees tears there.

When Rose finally speaks, she talks about how inspiring it was for her to have a mother with a career. She tells a story about the first time she was turned down for a job for bullshit boys’ club, “company culture” reasons. How Peggy had told her over the phone afterward to pour herself a drink and to toast the women who came before them and the ones who would come after. Because there had been so much work done and still so much left to do, so they had better buckle down to clear the way.

Steve laughs thinking about it. His heart aches.

Nate is slow getting to his feet, slow walking forward. In front of everyone, he stands for a moment with his hands in his pockets, not saying anything. He is 58 years old and Steve remembers him as a teenager.

When he does speak, what he says is this: “I love you, Mom. I miss you. You were our bones, but you taught us to stand on our own, too. I don’t think anyone will really know all that you did. Thank you.” 

Steve focuses on the air, on the movement of it in and out of his lungs. It’s the only thing he can do. It’s what he has to do, to make sure that he is still breathing.

* * *

He asks the kids for a moment alone after the graveside service. Em and Rose try to fuss at him about it, to have him come back to the house with them already, but he stands firm.

“I learned a little something from your mother, too,” he says lightly.

“You always were just as bad as each other,” says Bucky from behind him. He nods at the kids, and, reluctantly, they finally deem it safe enough to leave.

Layla sits on a bench on the nearby path, her head bent over a book although she turns her eyes up toward them every so often. Steve wonders if they had thought it would be rude for her to come over, as if flaunting that they still had each other.

“Hard day,” Bucky says, looking down at the dirt and grass.

Steve shakes his head. “I’ve had harder, I think.”

“Doesn’t mean that this is any better.”

Bucky puts his hand on Steve’s shoulder. They buried the Commandos together, one by one, buried Howard. Someday soon, they will probably bury Maria, maybe Layla too.

Steve doesn’t know which one of them will bury the other. He isn’t sure which answer he can stand.

“Ready to go home?” Bucky asks.

The grave is so fresh. Steve can’t think of Peggy down there, still impeccable in the red dress that she’d requested. He can’t stop thinking of it. “I don’t know—” he starts, the words coming out slowly, with deliberate weight. “I don’t know that I can anymore.”

"Of course you can," says Bucky firmly. "You've got your kids and your grandkids and your goddamn great-grandkids." Steve thinks about Will and Santi driving down to introduce Angelina to them. Peggy hadn't been able to travel very well by then. The memory still makes him smile.

"And," Bucky finishes, "you've got me. Till the end of—"

"I know," Steve tells him. He sighs. “I know. Just...Give me a minute, okay?”

Bucky evaluates him, eyes sharp and careful. How long has it been since he lay observing, a rifle in hand? So long that it feels almost imaginary. Finally he nods and walks over to sit with Layla.

Steve stands alone. The breeze rippling the grass brushes ghostly cold along his neck. He thinks of Peggy’s fingers in his, the tip of her frigid nose burrowing against his warm neck when she would come in from the outdoors on a brisk day. He crouches into the dirt and presses his fingers to the temporary grave marker. "I'll be back," he says softly before he lets himself follow Bucky to the car. He will be back here, probably tomorrow, and maybe the next day too. And there will be a time - perhaps soon, perhaps a little later on - when he'll certainly be home again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was probably the third fragment I wrote for this story - the first chapter, The Kids, then this - and I had initially planned to have it closer to whenever I decided to end the story. But then I realized what a frickin bummer that would have been, signaling the end with all that angst, so you get it here instead: a healthy dose of angst coming to you on just a random Sunday.


	21. 1994

Steve’s not in the general habit of warning his kids away from things. He doesn’t do it when Nate wants to build a five foot tall science fair volcano, nor when Drea tells them that she’s going to get herself into Harvard and is leaving herself no other option; he buys the baking soda and vinegar instead, flips through flashcards and drives to speech and debate tournaments. When Emma comes home for winter break during her sophomore year at Gallaudet and says that she’s not sure she’s going back, he asks why rather than telling her that of course she is. When she decides she will graduate after all, making plans to switch her major from Communications to Business and starting to put together a plan for her own café and bakery once she finishes, he doesn’t try to scare her off with talk of how difficult it will be. He is there first thing the day they open. And when, fifteen years later, she brings her husband and kids over for Sunday dinner and tells him and Peggy that she’s looking to run for town council, all he asks is, “How can I help?”

Apparently the main answer is babysitting. Eric is supportive of her campaign but he works and can’t always be there when she’s doing a midmorning question and answer session with the PTA at the local elementary school. The boys are both in school themselves at this point, but Julie is still only six months, and the idea of hiring someone to watch her at that age is what has left Emma on the fence about the whole thing in the first place. Steve, on his way to retirement after nearly twenty years, is a good alternative. 

The boys’ teachers know him well by this point, waving and smiling as he pulls into the parking lot for pickup. ("They like you better," Emma had said to him, "than they ever liked me." "I don't remind them that they have to do better than math worksheets for homework," Steve said back.) When he goes to get Max, he actually gets out of the car to speak with Mrs. Jennings, who started teaching at MSD back when Emma was a student. Her hair is nearly all silver by now.

Finally the boys make enough faces against the window that he wraps up his conversation and returns to the car.

"Where are we going?" Will asks once they're on the way back to town. "Are we going home? Do we have popcorn?"

"We're not going home, we're going to watch your mom finish up her talk. She wants to see you and drive you home after," Steve tells him, watching in the rearview as Will relays the information to his younger brother. Max and Will spend half their time in little spats and the occasional punchup, but they are united in their sighing disdain for the plan. Steve tries to cover a smile. "We do have popcorn, though."

He doesn't remember having toted this much stuff around even in the midst of raising four kids, though that’s probably because all of Julie's accessories make up most of it - diapers and wipes, bottles, blankets, pacifiers, little stuffed toys - and he never had to deal much with baby gear. He's an expert at packing a bag now, filling the side pockets with books and handheld games, comics, coloring pages, and—of course—snacks.

Will and Max plunk themselves down on a bench, close to where Emma is speaking to a group of a few dozen in front of the local grocery store. "Popcorn, popcorn," Max starts chanting in ASL, his excited little finger flicks increasing in pace as he settles into the rhythm. Will joins him after a minute. Steve is holding Julie's carrier in one hand (she's still sleeping, thankfully; the campaign trail has really made her a trooper in that area) but he manages to rest the enormous bag on the pavement beside them.

He points to the right side pocket, and they fall on the bag, tearing open the snack as soon as they find it and digging their hands in. Knowing that they'll be satisfied for the moment, Steve turns to watch Emma.

"—help support local small businesses," Millie is interpreting, her voice as confident as Em's hands. "I believe that the citizens here should have a say in the sorts of stores and industry that comes to town, so I would take into consideration a preference for chain stores from my constituents. But I'm also a small business owner like some of you, and I know it's a shame to lose those institutions. A town can be well-served by family-owned stores like this, in more ways than one." Emma points over her shoulder at the doorway to the market, and Steve can see people nodding. It's taken the first several months of campaigning to get people past the questions of whether Emma could do the job, to get them to even believe she was saying anything when she signed rather than just having Millie make up translations. But now that they're listening, now that they trust her, he knows they like what they hear.

"I'm thirsty, Grandpa," Will signs, licking salt off of his fingers, while Max adds, "Where're the good crayons?"

Steve sets Julie's carrier gently on the ground, rooting around for the box. He finds them and hands them over to Max, who opens up his Disney coloring book to the next blank picture and starts filling it in, tongue poking from the corner of his mouth in concentration.

"Grandpa," Will repeats, "I'm really thirsty." He accompanies the trickling motion of the sign along his throat with an enormous eyed gaze of desperation, a desert waif sort of look that Steve has no idea where he learned.

Julie starts to stir, and Steve tries to lull her back to sleep by rocking the carrier a little with his foot. "We'll go into the store in a few minutes," he tells Will, but the boy shakes his head.

"They don't sell the good kind of juice there," he says, as if this is the most sensible thing in the world. "We should try the gas station." He points across the street; the station itself is closed for construction - Max had pointed out the heavy digging equipment on their way into the parking lot - but the attached convenience store is open. 

This is what Steve has worked for all these years: a world where it would be unthinkable that growing up Grandpa didn't know good juice from bad because he never had any juice at all, a world where his kids and grandkids will never experience the same sorts of things he did growing up, where hopefully as few people will as possible. But Steve also knows that he isn't going to give in to this kind of attitude. It’s the sort of time where Peggy would have conveyed her firm disappointment with a look.

"We'll go look in the market," he repeats firmly. "Let me try to calm down your sister first."

But even Will, crossing his arms sullenly, can see that this is a lost cause. Julie is noticeably awake and crying now, not loudly enough for any of the potential voters to look over, but certainly enough for Steve to hear. He unbuckles her from the seat and picks her up, holding and rocking her in one arm.

"We'll go in a few min—" he starts to tell Will again, but before he can finish, the gas station across the street explodes.

Steve has Julie against his chest, his body curved over the boys before he can think. The explosion shakes the ground, and he can tell there's a fire even before he chances a look over his shoulder. The cloud of smoke and flame is even worse than he had anticipated from the drifting scent of burning: a towering enormity of color somehow made dark. For the first time in years, he wishes for the shield, the protective, nearly impenetrable shell of it.

"You, go inside and call 911. Tell them the exact location." It's Millie's voice, only a little shaky as it rises over the sudden noise. Steve looks over. The crowd is shifting, startled and confused edging into panicked, but Emma is standing firm. She directs people with quick calm, trusting Millie to relay her instructions and the people around her to listen: this woman to tell the manager what they've seen, a group to search between the parked cars to make sure no one fell or got injured.

"Grandpa, you're squashing me." Will says just what he is thinking, even now, but as Steve finally pulls back to give him a bit of room, he looks shell-shocked. It seems as if he might actually be close to crying. Julie certainly is, full-throated and frightened now in a way that will be difficult to comfort. As Steve watches, Will slips his hand into Max's.

"What was that?" Max asks, eyes wide and mouth open as he tries to glimpse over his grandfather's shoulder. His hand moves forcefully through the air. His coloring book has fallen to the ground, the bright cover facing upward, thin pages crumpling in on themselves beneath the weight.

"The gas station—there was an accident." It's the best he can do right now to balance the truthful version of what he knows without being terrifying.

"Dad!" Steve stands fully, keeping a hand on Max's shoulder. Julie is still giving cranky sorts of whimpers, even snugged against the softness of Steve's sweater. Will stands close to Steve's legs as Emma strides over. Millie, her job done for the moment now that Steve's attention has been caught, twists her hands. Her lips press tightly together, eyes wide behind her black-framed glasses. Steve catches her eye, trying to convey some sort of silent courage, but he isn't sure it's helped. He turns his attention to his daughter, whose words are coming fast.

"I don't think there are injuries on this side," she tells him. Her hands are so firm, precise, as she points to the ground they stand on. Her eyes can’t keep ahold of him, flashing back over to her children, to the hanging plants for sale which have not yet settled back into a leisurely swing.

"Good job," Steve says. He bends close, allowing Julie to nuzzle into her hold. His arm free, he wraps it around Em, kissing the top of her head. Hands held between them, where no one else can see, he repeats it. "Good job, brave girl."

She lets out a shaky breath, then straightens. "Bring the kids inside?"

His hand is already on Max's back, encouraging the boy toward his mother. Will is looking between the two of them with big eyes. "I'm going over—see what I can do."

"No." She closes her fingers with a snap, the way she would react to one of the boys asking for a cookie before dinner or someone at work wondering if they can skip out on the hourly restroom check just this once. "The firefighters—they're coming in a few minutes. The fire is their job."

Steve shakes his head. "A few minutes might be too long to try to save whoever is over there." He shifts Will forward too, despite his betrayed look, despite the wrench he feels. It is much easier to throw yourself into danger when there aren't people you care about to come back to, but he's always known that. He starts moving in the direction of the fire anyway.

"I don’t care. You’re not a superhero!" Emma looks anguished, but the anger is there too. He can see it in the tension of her arm supporting the baby. "You're my dad."

The smile he gives her is so sad, so small, it might not even count. "I'm a little of both," he says, and goes to try to do what he can.

But when he gets across the street to where a couple other men are considering the flames with horror, they turn him back too.

"We can't have you dropping and needing another ambulance," one of them shouts over the roar, and it’s only when he adds, “sir,” to the end of it that Steve understands. Because it’s not a military sort of respect that he is getting, it is the rote politeness due to the elderly. This man does not see any trace of Captain America in front of him, not expanded lung capacity or accelerated healing or increased speed. He does not see Grant Carter, who raised four amazing children, who strives to be a good husband, who declined the promotions offered to him over the years because he wanted to work with kids and families instead of numbers and higher-ups. Grant Carter, on whose effort, on whose _word_ , the world changed to be what it is. He certainly cannot see Steve Rogers beneath that, who would have run into the fire before all of it - still and anyway and always.

This stranger can’t be blamed for what he assumes: an old man, kindly and graying, who should be sent safely back to his family rather than endangering himself in memory of some once-been youth. Steve reminds himself, as the fire trucks arrive with lights and sirens blaring, that such a thought is only natural. But he thinks of this, too: that perhaps it isn’t entirely wrong. Even if he had been training, even though he is still enhanced in some ways, how effective would he be now? His time for this sort of work has likely passed without his even realizing that the expiration date was upon him, without him having done all he could with it.

He shaped a life, shaped a world, with the choice he made, and he wouldn’t change it. But sometimes, these times, when the things he can no longer do, the sorts of things he has not done or not done enough over the years, present themselves to him, he cannot help but feel ashamed.

“You’re not a superhero,” Emma had said to him, and it’s true and it isn’t and somehow, forty years on, he is still sometimes reminded of how he lives in the overlap.

He returns to his family, helps Emma carry over the jugs of water she has wrangled out of the store owner to hand out to the fire crews and those living in the surrounding houses who come out to search for fresh air and answers as the smoke drifts into their homes. Will, his small face pale and serious, holds the cups in two hands while Steve fills them.

They stay as firefighters support the owner of the station, two customers, and a cashier out from around the back. The owner cannot stop staring at the column of flame, still raging. He twists his head toward it even as they guide him away.

They stay as the news stations arrive, a duo from the local paper, snapping pictures and asking questions. They stay as the mayor speaks to Emma, both of them intent and careful. They stay as water and time force the fire to grow smaller, turning the kids away from the revealed skeletal remains that once were machinery and the hidden remains of truer skeletons. Even Millie turns her back as the corner’s van arrives, although Julie, in her arms, is sleeping once again. 

When they finally leave - all the kids and Millie in Emma’s car, and Steve in his - it is already dark. Eric, though trying to look calm cutting broccoli at the kitchen table, stands as soon as they all get into the kitchen, the knife still rocking on the cutting board. His questions are overrun by the boys' frantic hands, and just as things start to settle, Peggy arrives, having heard some vague details on the car radio on the way back from the speech she had been giving that afternoon, and they have to start all over again.

Dinner is a harried affair. Emma nurses Julie at the table, signing with one hand over her daughter's head, rather than going to sit in the living room rocker as usual. She won’t fully look at her father, and Steve knows that Peggy notices. The adults take turns reminding Will and Max to actually eat, which they do when prompted, eyes tracking the conversation the entire time and occasionally waving a hand to contribute.

Other than these admonishments, Steve stays mostly quiet. He watches as Max becomes more breathlessly hyperactive, overshadowing Will's growing quiet. Millie excuses herself at bedtime - stretching the bounds of professionalism by staying for dinner isn't unusual for her these days, but the intensity of the afternoon seems to be bearing down on her even as she tries to keep herself together. Steve hopes that Emma doesn't have anything overly pressing during the next few days.

Em goes to put Julie into her crib, and Eric joins her, still rubbing a hand over his forehead. Steve and Peggy exchange a glance - “my turn or yours?” with a side of "we'll talk about all the rest later" - and she goes to wrangle Max into a bath, while Steve presses Will to find his pajamas.

He can hear splashing on tile as he tucks Will in, but there's no complaint about little brothers getting to stay up too late, no insistence on three, no four, books tonight. Will just slides himself quietly under the covers. Without asking, Steve snaps on the nightlight that doesn't get much use anymore.

"I'm afraid that Max will have bad dreams from today," Will says, but there is a little waver to his attempt at being matter-of-fact. "I think he was really scared back there."

"Hmm," Steve says, settling himself on the side of the bed. "I don't blame him. Today was scary. It made me pretty worried. And if someone else other than Max was also worried or scared, even someone older, it would make a lot of sense to me. Just like it would make sense to tell people like your mom and dad, or Gran, or me if you—if _someone_ was still feeling that way, so we could try to figure out how to help."

Will's hand somehow finds its way into his. "What kinds of things make you stop feeling scared?"

Steve's policy on comforting lies is not particularly well formulated; it's more of a gut instinct thing. Now he sighs. "Well, there's no way to stop being scared for always, and it's not a good thing to never be scared of anything. Only a robot would never be scared, and I like having human grandchildren instead of robots." Will laughs a little, head resting more completely back onto his pillow. "But the thing that helped me stop feeling so scared today was going over to help."

Will frowns. "Even though the firefighters did the big helping?"

"Even though." The words are out of his mouth before he realizes that they are not a lie. He remembers, from years away, giving a speech about prices he was willing to pay, even alone, and the way that he hadn't needed to stand alone at all. There were always people beside him who had none of the things he'd been gifted with, always people out there helping to right things with nothing but skill and wits - and sometimes not even that, only willingness to try. There is such honor in reminding himself of his place, now, in their number. 

“And we helped the firefighters, didn’t we?” Will asks.

“We did.” Steve smooths back a piece of his dirty blond hair. “They were very thirsty, so we were doing important work, helping them.”

“Next time,” Will says around a yawn, “we should get them juice. The good kind.” He yawns again, flipping over onto his side seemingly without realizing it. His blinks are becoming farther and farther apart. “And maybe I’ll have some too.”

“We’ll see,” Steve says with a smile, and waits beside him for another few minutes before he stands to turn off the light and close the door. Will is going to be fine. They all are, today.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, I'm back, but let's see if it's worth it.
> 
> I've been watching the damn Sorkin clips again and there are places where it peeks somewhat baldly through. *Captain Holt voice* No regrets.
> 
> This chapter began as a totally different idea - someone with a gun shooting at the campaign event; some fairly obvious bigotry stuff, but also more action, which is, you know, my super forte. Then I realized that it was sort of distracting from the thing I was meant to be writing about.
> 
> I touched on some of these ideas all the way back in the second chapter, but Steve and I are in constant conversation with the idea of him giving up his superheroism. There'll probably be a bit more about it later on. But I wanted to set a piece in this part of the timeline: when Steve would be faced with the idea of an expiration date, that he would come to a point where doing that physical sort of world saving would not be something that he could just pick up again when he was ready for it. So there's your weekly behind the scenes peek, I guess.


	22. 1974-1975

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Strong heads up for implied transphobia throughout this chapter.

Harvard is, in some ways, everything Drea wanted. She’s on her way, she's gotten to this place, earned her spot: as supportive as Mom is, she would never allow herself to use whatever friends or influence she might have to get special consideration, and Drea would never want her to.

Everything is different from high school. It’s easy to find people who love learning the way she does. They’re everywhere. There are trust fund kids and legacies, of course, plenty of them, but there are also talented people who want to make the future. And all the sorts of things Rose talked gleefully about when she started college - staying up until 4 AM one night to write a paper then staying up again the next to go see a band, people being so casually passionate about this cause or that protest, sliding with your friends into your regular booth at your regular off-campus pizza place, _having_ a regular off-campus pizza place - it’s all happening for Drea too, just like she had hoped.

In some ways it’s just as bad as she feared. Worse.

She’s gone from being one of the youngest in her class to being one of the oldest, and she feels like she should be wiser for it. She has stories to tell during icebreakers or house mixers; when called to it, she can speak honestly about the year she took off between high school and college. When it's her turn, she talks about volunteering and getting a different type of experience before coming back to the classroom. She can see that it impresses the people around her, both professors and fellow students. It makes her different and special and interesting in a way that’s acceptable.

She never talks about the parts with doctors or surgery, the relief of it and the pain. Keeping her business to herself has always been second nature, and she had thought it was something she was used to, going on with that background tension, that worry. All those years of carefully using school bathrooms and accepting rare sleepover invitations...It’s not the same as living with suitemates. She had thought that having her own room would be enough. She wasn’t prepared for the emotions of it: not being able to go home at the end of a day or maybe two, to the people who knew everything, who she didn’t have to put up walls around. Even as she makes friends and laughs with them, joins study groups, finds a favorite spot in the library, it feels as if she is more guarded than ever.

Those blending-in tricks that she taught herself still work, and she starts using them more and more. Each time she puts on a blouse instead of a T-shirt, laughs and says that _of course_ she couldn’t have a second bowl of ice cream, she feels a bit less exposed. She has a deft hand with makeup now, and when the boy next to her calculates the tip wrong at the pizza place, she doesn’t say anything, only puts in the extra money herself. She makes little errors, doesn’t try as hard as she might on exams or papers, averages somewhere between a B and B-plus instead of her high school As. Her group of friends gives in to tradition, going to see the Red Sox play a Saturday afternoon game, and she doesn’t cheer without looking purposefully at the others, never gets up to shout at a batter, doesn’t list off any of the stats or rules that are still in her head. But there’s a frustration even with feeling the need to do those things. College, for everyone else, means pushing boundaries and exploring who they really are. Drea thinks she knows who she is, still, beneath it all, but digging it out and showing the world seems so dangerous a proposition.

There’s a group for gays and lesbians on campus, small and pretty quiet, but she could find out where they meet if she wanted to. She thinks they might understand, at least a little, but she can’t bring herself to do it. Even beyond the fear of calling attention to herself, she isn’t gay or lesbian and she won’t pretend to be just so she can talk to people who might have experiences something like hers. These are people who know lies well; she won’t add more. And she does not know whether they would be any more accepting of the truth than anyone else - perhaps even less, if they considered her a distraction, someone who would only serve to confuse their cause to outsiders.

She isn’t ready to be a cause. She’s trying hard enough to be a self.

* * *

The last week of April, people start talking about their summer plans, none of which are even being planned anymore, all foregone conclusions: travel, a job, summer classes, going back home to laze around or help with the family business. In some ways Drea craves the idea of home more than anything in perhaps her entire life. She imagines lying on her old mattress in Maryland and thinks that she would sleep for days as soon as she touched it. She wants Dad to hand her a bag of green beans to tip while he makes Surprise Meatloaf simply because he knows it’s her favorite, wants to talk politics with Mom and ask how she works with people who are vehement about opinions that are just entirely wrong. She wants to be shocked at how tall Nate is getting and go to the roller rink with Emma. She wants Rose to talk to, even when she’s pretending that she doesn’t. She wants everyone back in their place, how it was. She wants to be back in her place.

“If I come home,” she tells Dad one night, “I’m afraid I won’t be able to make myself come back.” It is late and she knows that she’s woken him, but this is the only time to take a turn on the hallway phone without anyone overhearing. She shivers a little and tucks herself closer; her nightshirt is fairly thin and she forgot to bring her robe.

“You worked so hard for it, and you've nearly exhausted the library here anyway. You need a challenge for your mind. A few months and I think you’ll want to go back.” He says it gently, lightly, but with such confidence that she can’t bring herself to tell him that just hearing his voice makes her throat feel thick and teary, that just saying the words “come home” gives her an ache along her breastbone. Never mind how Harvard is important, how she _did_ work hard for it and has found things to enjoy despite it all. Never mind that once she makes it through, no one can take it away.

But he must hear something in her breathing, in that extra beat of silence. “Let me talk to your mom,” he says. “I think she’ll have an idea.”

She hadn’t realized until now just how much she’d missed hearing that.

* * *

Mr. Jarvis wears glasses now. He gazes at Drea over them, then looks over at Tony, who seems entirely absorbed in assembling an elaborate structure using blocks.

Jarvis doesn’t look convinced by his demeanor. Drea decides that she won’t either. She knows for a fact that the blocks are only a last resort anyway; Aunt Maria said that the chemistry set and the electronics kit aren't allowed to stay in Tony’s room until he's at least nine.

“Well, I shall leave the two of you to it,” Jarvis says. “I’m sure I don’t need to remind you to remember your manners, Master Stark?”

“I _always_ remember my manners,” says Tony with solemnity, still stacking busily. Jarvis makes a dubious “hmm” sound as he leaves, but Tony waits until he’s out the door before adding, “But sometimes I don't want to use them.”

Drea snorts, then coughs to cover it up. To Tony she’s an adult, and she’s pretty sure that means she isn’t supposed to think sassing the other adults is funny.

Tony looks over at her. She suspects that he’s seen through the cough.

Crouching on the floor beside him, she picks up some blocks herself, trying to add them in places that won’t disrupt the careful architecture. Tony watches her silently for a minute, then seems to decide that she’s foolish but fairly harmless and goes back to his own work.

“Are you supposed to be my babysitter?” he asks after a minute.

Drea pauses, nudging a block carefully into place before answering. “Kind of, I guess. Just for the summer. I think Mr. and Mrs. Jarvis have other work to do.”

The Jarvises have been somewhat old for practically Drea’s whole life, but there’s a difference between general fitness despite graying hair or a little slowness to the limbs, and the energy required to keep up with Tony. Mom always says that one shouldn’t underestimate the Jarvises, but at this point even they seem to be open to the idea of some type of help, at least to tide them over until Tony starts school. She just has the feeling that she wasn’t exactly what they had in mind.

“What kind of babysitter are you?” Tony asks, as if he's interviewing her for the position. She doesn’t think he’d take kindly to her reminder that she’s already gotten it (on the merit of a call from her parents to Uncle Howard, but still).

“A pretty good one,” she lies, trying to inject some reassuring boisterousness into her tone. Her childcare resume is fairly sparse - her own siblings don’t count - but he doesn’t need to know that. Tony looks her over consideringly.

“I hope,” he says, prodding another block into place, “that you’re different from your sister.”

He means Rose, who has watched Tony along with the rest of them when they’ve gone away together to Maine or when the Starks have come to visit and the parents have gone out for the evening. Rose has very strict ideas on exactly who needs to listen to her, and how immediately, with which Tony has fundamental disagreements.

“I’m not exactly like Rosie.” She stops one of the pillars from toppling, straightening the blocks. Tony evaluates it and then gives a firm nod. “But if you want a really good babysitter, you should get Emma. She’ll bake you cookies, and maybe even teach you her secret recipe.”

“Do you bake?”

“Sure, but I don’t have a secret cookie recipe.”

“Not a secret’s okay too.” He blinks at her.

She finds herself grinning over at him. Drea doesn’t do that a lot; usually she just gives nice little smiles. “You want to go bake some cookies?”

The remaining blocks shed off his lap as he stands. “I have a better idea, actually. It’s all mostly just chemistry anyway.”

An hour and a half later, the big kitchen downstairs is covered in powdery white - flour and yeast and baking soda all floating into a snowy layer. It’s drifted even onto the pages of the still-open cookbooks that hadn’t offered what they’d needed. Drea rests the tray of hot pretzels on the counter just as Jarvis comes in and looks around in dismay.

“The baking soda is important,” Tony tells him. “It’s how the outside gets crispy and the inside stays soft. Just like for bagels.” He reaches to break off a piece, but Drea pushes his hand away, looking up to shrug at Jarvis.

“I have to support his science education. He can’t fall behind just because it’s the summer.”

“Or because he’s a child,” Jarvis says, raising a wry brow, and hands them damp clothes while he goes to fetch the broom.

* * *

They go to Central Park often, and Drea lets Tony think it’s her first time being there. He shows her all of his favorite things, a surprising number of which involve nature for someone who is being raised by one of the foremost technological minds of the century and seems happy to follow in his footsteps. He frequently requests a picnic basket for them to carry to Sheep’s Meadow or Cedar Hill, standing on a stool at the kitchen counter while Jarvis suggests sandwich fillings as if they are a Victorian lady and her cook putting together a dinner party menu, selecting fruits only after careful consideration, a miniature and bull-headed connoisseur.

Tony eschews the zoo in favor of the birds and bugs and flowers of the Ramble, the turtles in their pond. She can’t find it in her heart to tell him that all of that is human-created nature too. Though perhaps, she thinks to herself as Tony crouches to silently watch a butterfly land on a branch near him, taking in the careful and beautiful converging details of abdomen and wings and coloration, nature has taken over here anyway and made it all its own.

“How come you’re always fancy?” Tony asks as they stand at the edge of the Gill, watching the stream flow away. This deep in the park, it’s hard to remember that she isn’t in the woods back in Maryland. “It would be easier if you wore pants. Then you could get really close and not be worried about getting dirty.” He frowns at the way she has edged back from the mud and water.

Drea switches the picnic basket to her other hand. It’s gotten lighter since she made a rule that he has to carry it for one minute per every ten that she does. “I’m just being safe. What if you slipped and fell in? I’d want to be able to make a plan and rescue you instead of falling in too.”

“I wouldn’t fall in. And anyways, it isn’t that deep.” He crosses his arms. “What the real reason?”

“I’m just more comfortable this way,” Drea says, the basket in her hand preventing her from crossing her arms too. It’s too hard to explain the difference between her actual comfort, and the comfort she gets from avoiding scrutiny. “Now, come on, let’s go have lunch.”

They visit the Planetarium with frequency, clearly not Tony’s first time there. One of the attendants greets him with a smile and a welcoming sweep of the arm, nodding a cheerful “Mister Stark” as they enter the theater. Another watches them approach with eyes glaring, muttering “Mister Stark” through clenched teeth and trying to glance toward Drea with some sort of solidarity as she passes.

“The universe is so big,” Tony says with satisfaction as they sit, still staring up, after the show has ended one afternoon. The rest of the visitors are getting to their feet around them. “I bet there are aliens out there, huh?”

“I wouldn’t be too surprised,” Drea says. “Anything could be out there. There's plenty right here, after all.” And, to her own surprise, she laughs.

* * *

Each Wednesday, Tony goes to spend the day at Stark Industries with his father. It’s been a tradition since Tony was little. There’s a famous picture of Uncle Howard sitting at a big table during a presentation, a baby seat set up next to him. Uncle Howard is pointing to something, and baby Tony is leaning forward in his seat to do the same.

Among the SI scientists or outside contractors coming to pitch ideas, agreeing to a meeting on a Wednesday is seen as either extremely confident or extremely foolish, or both. Tony has a habit of interrupting with loud questions, and Uncle Howard has a habit of making decisions based on whether his son falls asleep or wanders off during a particular presentation.

Drea uses her Wednesdays for herself. She takes long walks down the city streets, and even as she revels in not having to answer a million questions a minute, she misses the way Tony makes her think and how his chatter quiets her mind. Settling herself into the oddly wonderful smell of books and old carpeting at the New York Public Library, she pages through the favorites of her childhood and doesn’t think for a moment about getting a leg up on class readings for next semester. (She does think, however, of her favorite carrel deep in the confusing stacks of the Widener.) Once, she goes out with Aunt Maria to the rehearsal of a play called Mrs. Murray’s Farm at the Circle Theatre, which they both agree probably won’t have very much success off-Broadway, much less on. Another time, she’s invited to some sort of philanthropic lunch. When she declines, Aunt Maria just laughs and says, “I’m sure you’re having plenty of opportunity to get involved with causes at school and you don’t need to listen to us prattle on.” Drea gives something like a smile and crosses her arms and doesn’t mention that she’s scared to attend protests and even sign petitions. It feels as if it would call too much attention to her, and she’s ashamed of herself.

Tony is actually fairly well-behaved in museums, chattering, pointing to everything, but not throwing tantrums or incessantly requesting to leave like some of the other children she sees (unless she really overdoes it). Still, there are some exhibits which hold so little interest for him that making him attend would be selfish. She goes by herself, walking with slow steps through the galleries, trying to take in all the art and history. She sends her dad a postcard of the prints from the Museum of Modern Art: _It’s not the same_ , she writes, _without getting a lecture about shading or how lithographs are made. And, of course, it’s no National Gallery._

Some afternoons she makes her way to the Stark Industries building too, giving her name and waiting for Uncle Bucky or Aunt Layla or both to come out and join her for lunch. There’s something grown-up about walking beside them with a pocketbook over her shoulder, asking about what they’re working on and telling them about Tony or something she read recently, as if they are fellow adults out for a bite to eat together. She’ll be twenty in the fall, voting next year, and she still isn’t quite used to that sort of feeling.

One morning in early August she sleeps in, spending several hours reading lazily in bed and then taking a long bath sometime in the afternoon. In some ways it’s relaxing. There are several bathrooms back at home, but she rarely gets to lock herself in for an hour or more without being disturbed, having someone pound on the door and beg (or, in Rose’s case, order) her to just get out of there already. Also, the Starks have much better bathtubs. Even the one adjoining her guest room feels like a small swimming pool.

She holds her breath beneath the luxuriantly hot water, eyes open, long hair billowing outward. She finds herself wishing that Thursday would come already, so she will have Tony’s whims as an excuse for laughing and expelling her energy and getting messy.

When she gets out, she puts on her robe and sits on the edge of the bed. She holds the remote control in her hand, but doesn’t turn on the television set.

There’s a knock on the door and she startles a little, settling when she hears Ana’s light, chiming voice saying through the wood, “I have your blouse, dear.” She had asked Ana a couple of days ago to repair a tear for her; she does know how to do it herself, but Ana is fast and neater.

She stands to answer the knock, smiling at Ana as she takes the blouse without bothering to examine the stitching. “Thanks,” she says, going to close the door again.

“Oh, Drea, dear,” Ana says quickly. “I see that you’ve washed your hair. Would you mind—It’s been a long time since I had a chance to braid someone else’s hair. Could I possibly try my hand with yours?”

Ana’s hair is always so carefully arranged. As hard as Drea tries, her long, dark hair never seems to lie as evenly or stay as neat and pretty.

“Oh,” she says. “Okay, I guess.”

She’s directed to sit on the floor while Ana sits on the bed. It’s quiet except for the sound of the brush working through her hair. Ana’s concentration seems to be on smoothing out the knots and tangles. It actually feels very soothing.

“Sometimes,” Ana says, still untangling, “even today, a person will make a terrible remark in front of me about Jewish people. And when I say that I am Jewish, they will say of course I’m not, because they know _those people_ and I don’t act like one of them.” Her voice with its familiar slight accent, still there after all this time, is calm. Even the non sequitur feels dreamy and relaxed. She sets the brush aside and picks up a comb, tracing out sections along Drea’s scalp. “And sometimes, I will tell a person that I am Jewish and they will ask then which synagogue do I attend and where are my Sabbath candlesticks and my Jewish husband.” Her hands work gently with the strands of hair. “But no matter what these people or those people think, I still am who I am and very proud of it.”

She must hear Drea’s intake of breath but she does not pause to allow for any sort of answer or interruption. “I know very well how dangerous it can be to reveal yourself for the world. My friends, members of my family, were hurt or killed as people began to say that they were fooling everyone by pretending to be ordinary Hungarians. People who were kind can become cruel, even if simply with their words or by turning away with sympathy in their eyes. But caring so much for the way that others’ think and look at you, changing yourself and trying to pretend it all away - what kind of life is it to live?”

The braid is weaving into formation behind her. Drea feels tears in her eyes. “It’s too dangerous,” she whispers. “It could ruin everything. I know I should be brave and say to hell with everyone, but I can’t. It’s terrible, sometimes, trying to be just what people expect from a girl, but it’s so much easier, too.”

“Hmm.” Ana’s cheek rests briefly against the top of Drea’s head. “I understand. But there are so many different types of girls, the way that there are so many different types of Jews, and we are allowed to be a little of this and also a little of that - multitudes, as the poet says. Letting the person you are out into the world, perhaps just a little, might not be as dangerous as you think.”

* * *

The next Wednesday, Drea goes to Central Park by herself. She starts up one of the trails of the Ramble and before she knows it, she is running. Despite her skirt, despite what people might think of her, despite the man who yells, “Are you alright, young lady?” as she passes - she runs until she is panting, until she is laughing, broad and triumphant, until she has no breath.

* * *

She goes home for the last two weeks of the summer. Tony expresses his disapproval both vocally and by planting himself outside her door the day she is meant to leave.

“I’ll come back,” she promises, allowing him to keep a hold on her wrist even as Jarvis pulls the car around and parks.

“Next week?”

She ruffles his hair. “Try next summer, kid. I have things to do until then.” He has that mulish look back on his face, so she adds, “And so do you. You think three months of activities are going to plan themselves overnight? You have to show me a good time. I need you thinking about this until next year.”

“How very delightful the next months are certain to be,” Jarvis says dryly, picking up her suitcase and hefting it into the car.

She knew that Dad was going to come get her at the station, but Nate is there too, and Emma, and Mom, and even Rose.

“I don’t start again until next week,” her big sister says as they pile into the car. “And I couldn’t exactly leave without seeing you.”

There’s news to share all around, and souvenirs to hand out. They ask so many questions that Drea feels like a traveler back from exotic lands rather than the familiar premises of the Stark mansion.

Dad has made Surprise Meatloaf, and she doesn’t even have to tip the green beans. “Well, there’s always tomorrow,” he tells her with a wink, and she laughs.

There’s no chance to speak to him and Mom alone until late, when she comes downstairs from talking with Nate in his room to find them having a cup of tea together and probably waiting for her. There’s a third cup sitting empty; Mom pours, adds sugar, pushing it across the table as Drea sits down.

She stirs her cup thoroughly, staring into the cloudy heat of it, before she starts. “I’m going back,” she tells them. “Because I deserve to be there and to make the most of it. Because I want to. But I’m also—” She takes a breath. “I want to start seeing someone. A psychologist or a counselor, whatever you want to call it. There has to be one who’s safe to talk to, because I don’t know that I can keep everything hidden away anymore.” They are both watching her with care, neither preparing to interrupt, but she barrels on as if they might. “I know that you'd be here if I wanted to talk. And I know that you’ve worked hard to just let me be an average girl, and so much of my life has been normal and wonderful for it. But I’m not really average, I never will be, and I need some help dealing with that.”

Her parents trade glances. They don’t look upset or betrayed or anything of the sort, but Drea can’t bring herself to relax just yet.

Mom stands, and walks over to the front hall. Drea starts to get up to follow her, but Dad places a hand over hers, and she sinks back down. Her mother is back in only a minute, holding a manilla file folder.

“There are five in the area who seem reliable, but if you find someone else you’d prefer, I can certainly look into them as well.” She hands the folder over to Drea, who flips it open. “And if you’d like, we can contact the group at Hopkins to see if they might have former or potential patients who live close by who would be willing to speak with you. A bit more of an insider’s opinion.”

The list is neat and slightly clinical: names, office addresses, educational and occupational history. The typed Gs are a little wonky - Mom’s typewriter in her home office makes them like that; she’s been complaining about it absently for years without actually finding a replacement.

“I’ve put blue stars beside the ones that you would have to travel to using the bus system, and red stars for those accessible by subway,” Mom adds. “And tracing those routes was truly a nightmare. Why anyone would live in such a poorly designed city is outside of my comprehension.”

Drea looks at Dad, a bit of a question in her face. “Well, don’t expect me to stand up for Boston,” he says, eyes crinkling softly at the edges as he looks at her. He squeezes her hand.

It was this she was missing all year: being able to collapse, to allow truth into the open air, and to know that someone would have some sort of answer or at least be holding her hand after it all.

* * *

She’s the second one to arrive at the new suite in September.

Her parents help carry her things up to the fourth floor, take her for lunch, put up her posters where she directs them, lay fresh sheets on her bed. It’s several hours before they prepare to leave. Her mother holds her tightly. Her father kisses her forehead. “Have a good year,” he tells her, looking her directly in the eye, and she nods.

“Did you have a good summer?” asks Marnie, leaning in the doorway as Drea goes to finish unpacking once they’re gone. They had been roommates last year too. Alice won’t arrive until tomorrow. Kim had decided that she wanted a house close to the Yard instead of the Quad and joined another group instead, so a new girl called Bethany will benefit from their four South singles and big common room.

Drea tucks an orange T-shirt on the top of the pile and slides the drawer closed. It’s bright and sort of ugly, and will be the perfect thing to stand up wearing the next time they go to Fenway. “Yeah, summer was good. But I’m glad to be back.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, I did promise some Drea and Tony babysitting time.
> 
> This one took so long because I was going back and forth on a lot of stuff. Back and forth working through it with my friend Jess (shout out to Jess - she's not going to see it because she's not a fic reader, but shout out to her in appreciation of the time and perspective and experiences she shared with me), back and forth on trying to get in a little more random research, back and forth on whether I was ready to actually put it out into the world.
> 
> Speaking of research, some resources I used while writing this one (rabbit holes, I'm telling you):
> 
>   * Interviews with trans and nonbinary elders, some of whom lived during the time Drea would have been growing up and transitioning: Jess T. Dugan's project [To Survive on This Shore](https://www.tosurviveonthisshore.com/interviews), and [this discussion](https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/zmd5k5/sandy-stone-biography-transgender-history) with Sandy Stone
>   * Experiences following vaginoplasty [here](https://www.dailydot.com/irl/trans-sex-vaginoplasty-orgasms/) and [here](https://www.vox.com/2016/3/7/11162180/gender-affirming-surgery-transition), as well as on [living in a cisgender society](https://www.dailydot.com/irl/trans-woman-everyday-life-cis-didnt-exist/)
>   * My second direct massage of the timeline, but Harvard and Radcliffe merged a few years earlier than they did in our reality, which means both an academic and housing integration. (In my defense, even in our timeline, this shift was apparently [pretty sudden.)](https://harvardmagazine.com/2011/11/more-as-people-than-dating-objects)
>   * Big ups to The Crimson, Harvard's undergrad-run newspaper since 1873, for digitizing their archives so I could get some info on early gay organization and life on campus ([1970](https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1970/2/20/graduate-school-students-organize-homophile-club/), [1972](https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1972/10/2/gays-hold-first-meeting-of-the/), [1974](https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1974/12/11/association-declares-gay-day-supporters-will/), [1975](https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1975/11/18/being-gay-at-harvard-pmy-experiences/)) and on the possibility of having a phone in your dorm hallway in the seventies (hey, [it happened at least once](https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1970/10/29/faulty-phone-service-in-currier-hallways/)!)
>   * Big ups also to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) for putting pics and descriptions of their old exhibits online, including the [Prints from the Collection exhibit](https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/2704?locale=en) that Drea visits
>   * Mrs. Murray's Farm is a real play, and you can see the script [here](https://books.google.com/books?id=RXLxYI2yfZsC)
>   * Third direct massage of the timeline and second this chapter: Central Park was [apparently gross in the seventies,](https://ephemeralnewyork.wordpress.com/2015/01/26/just-how-bad-was-central-park-in-the-1970s/) but not these seventies! Tried to find actual maps from the period, but I ended up comparing historical maps of the park  to the Central Park Conservancy's [excellent interactive modern version](https://ephemeralnewyork.wordpress.com/2015/01/26/just-how-bad-was-central-park-in-the-1970s/)
>   * Here's a timeline change that actually makes sense: Vietnam is different, so there's no real cause to lower the voting age. It's still twenty-one.
>   * The Hopkins group which Peggy references is the Johns Hopkins Gender Identity Clinic - some info on its founding, the viewpoints of its founders, and its eventual closure [here](https://baltimorestyle.com/fe_sexchange_jf07/), [here](https://books.google.com/books?id=RbnYr3-_v_QC), and [here](https://books.google.com/books?id=eGkgDQAAQBAJ&pg=PP18&lpg=PP18&dq=%22The+Hopkins+Gender+Identity+Clinic%22&source=bl&ots=GhyLzGUU1S&sig=ACfU3U3InUSr_DZx-3zRV5TXgQ5k_1XQPg&hl=en&ppis=_e&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjx-p3wlcjlAhWOmeAKHWF7DGsQ6AEwDnoECAoQAQ#v=onepage&q=%22The%20Hopkins%20Gender%20Identity%20Clinic%22&f=false)
>   * I wasn't able to find much contemporaneous information on Harvard dorms, but extrapolating from the modern day, Drea lives in (most likely) Wigglesworth her first year before moving to South House (now known as Cabot House) - both dorms with single rooms as part of their suites
> 



	23. 1990

It starts with England for their thirtieth anniversary. He surprises her with the tickets three weeks in advance, mid-August, so that she has enough time to arrange to be away. She’s been back since the end of the war, but mostly on business and they’ve never been together. Now Peggy takes him to what was once her house, sketching with hands and words the way things had been, the way that they still are in her memories, although the reality has changed so much. He had done the same as they went past now-demolished tenements and renovated schoolhouses back in Brooklyn. They walk arm in arm down London streets they once strode down in uniform, side by careful side, and marvel at how different it all has become.

After that, they chose somewhere new every year: Spain, Japan, Brazil, Morocco. They try to find native guides in each destination, someone to show off the hidden treasures that tourists don’t usually know about or take the time to see. Steve puts together albums to show the kids when they come home. As he flips through the pages, he notices that they have automatic positions that they assume for pictures together, wherever they are in the world.

* * *

They have been in Russia for a week before they go to Volgograd, and even then Steve delays. They go to a few museums, take a city walking tour, visit the Eltonsky Natural Park and its surprisingly lovely salt lake, and Peggy is wondering how much longer he is going to put it off when he asks her if she would like to do some shopping after lunch.

“Certainly,” she says, finishing off the last of the medovik she had ordered for dessert. “And it seems the perfect time for it: to be honest, I’m not sure that even I could tour another war monument.”

They pick up some general souvenirs for the kids - pretty little pottery dishes, elaborately painted Matryoshka dolls, lovely and delicate Orenburg shawls - at the various shops along the street. They are each carrying a weighty bag by the time they reach the music store.

“Good afternoon,” a woman’s voice calls in Russian from deep in the crowded shop, and a moment later she steps out to rest her hands on the counter. Her face is young but a bit careworn, a few silvery strands already sneaking into her hair, although it is hard to tell whether it is from age or simply the propensity for redheads to begin getting white hairs early.

“Can I help you?” she asks, looking between Peggy and Steve.

Peggy steps forward. “Good afternoon. We are visiting from America, and were doing some shopping in your neighborhood.” Her Russian is, as she would say with just a bit of satisfaction, quite serviceable. The woman smiles.

“We do not see many tourists here, so I am happy you were able to visit. Are you shopping for something special?”

Before Peggy can answer, there is the light, sharp sound of heels tapping downstairs and a small girl, red hair pinned back from her face, enters behind her mother.

“Mamochka, are you certain I don’t have my dancing class today?” she asks winningly, barely glancing at the strangers in the shop.

“Yes, Natashenka,” says the woman, with that mix of fondness and real weariness that Steve knows well. “I am certain that you don’t have your dancing class today, because it is Wednesday and you dance on Monday.”

“Ah.” The girl purses her lips, standing on her tiptoes and taking a few steps back and forth, running a finger along the counter.

“But _Wednesday_ ,” continues her mother, “is the perfect day to practice the violin, hmm?”

With a charming smile: “Are you sure? Maybe Thursday would be better.”

“Wednesday and also Thursday would be just fine for me,” and Steve stifles a laugh at the pout on Natasha’s face before she sighs and moves back among the rows of instruments and sheet music.

“I apologize,” says the woman, turning back to Steve and Peggy. “What were you looking for?”

“Our daughter plays the piano,” Peggy lies. “And we wondered if you might have some traditional sheet music for us to bring back. Folk songs, perhaps.”

“I’d like to explore the shop, if you don’t mind,” Steve says, knowing that his Russian is more formal and less fluid or practiced than Peggy’s. It doesn’t seem to matter; he is waved back as the two women fall into conversation.

The shop is narrow but fairly deep. There are thick carpets on the floors, handheld instruments along one wall - strings hanging or propped on stands, woodwinds in little carved nooks, a few brass items and an accordian interspersed between - and drawers along the other, presumably for sheet music. He follows the tentative plucking of violin strings back until he finds a little rehearsal space with music stands and a small upright piano. Little Natasha stands in the center with her shoes off, toes curling in the carpet as she rests the instrument on her shoulder.

“Hello,” he says, his voice pitched not loudly enough to disturb, but not softly enough for a secret either.

“Hello,” she returns, eagerly letting her bow rest against the floor as she turns to him, ready to be distracted.

“Would you play something for me?” he asks. “It can be anything you like.”

“I don’t know how to play songs I like yet,” she says, drooping a little. He smiles. He remembers a preference for - simultaneously - classical music and female fronted punk, but he doesn’t think that’s what this girl has in mind.

“Then maybe just something you’ve been practicing? I’d like to hear you.”

She takes a deep breath in and plays a simple but lively piece. Even he can hear the mistakes, but it’s pretty and more than he could ever attempt. The melody continues rising, not quite hitting a crescendo before she pulls the bow away and says, “That’s all I remember.”

He puts down his bag to clap politely. “That was very good,” he says. “I’m sure your mother is very proud.”

She makes a face. “She says that I could be better, that she started practicing when she was even younger than me. But she also says that Papa was born with a violin in his hand, and I don’t think that can be true.”

“I suppose you come from a very musical family,” Steve says, trying to blank his face although he suspects that a smile is still playing around his mouth.

“Mama says that music comes to us like water comes to the Volga.” She sets the violin on the piano bench and perches up on her tiptoes again. “But I have a secret.” She tilts her head in question, wondering if he is trustworthy, and he crouches automatically, tilting his head in receptive return.

She leans in a little before she whispers, “I want to be a dancer, not a musician.” She does a little pirouette, girlish and clumsy and eager, her arms out and toes barely avoiding being tangled in the carpet pile. She faces him again with an enormous smile, a little mischievous in a way that is familiar, free in a way that is not.

Steve thinks of the restraint in Natasha as he knew her, the deliberation taken with every action, even with her joy. He swallows against the pain in his throat.

“I think that you will be a very excellent dancer,” he says. “But music is good for learning too. My children did not learn about music from me, and needed to learn on their own.”

“How many children do you have?”

“Four.” He takes a photo out of his wallet and shows her. “My daughters,” he says, pointing. “And my son. And my grandsons. And two husbands and one wife.”

She looks at the smiling strangers in the picture then back up at him. “Why do you talk like that? Your words are so strange.”

“I’m American. I usually speak English. I haven’t spoken Russian in a long time.”

Natasha considers this, then declares magnanimously, “For a Russian, you do not speak very good Russian, but for an American you are excellent.”

“Thank you.” Steve laughs, and stands to his feet once more. “A friend taught me.”

He had not asked her to do it, but in those years of partnering on missions for SHIELD and then later, after Tony had stepped away and Clint had left and Bruce was locked in his lab, when it was just the shattered two of them helping to keep some sort of order...He never questioned when or why she started her little lessons, just took them in. He had trusted Natasha, had admired and fought beside her, had mourned her, mourns her still in some ways, but there was so much he had hoped to understand about her and never can.

The little girl who will never be Natasha Romanoff slips her hand into his. “She must have been a very good friend. I would not have so much patience.”

“She was,” Steve says, gently squeezing her small fingers, “a very good friend.”

* * *

The information he had to find her had been so limited. Red hair. Russia. “Natasha, daughter of Ivan,” Clint had reported to them, and despite its source, Steve trusted that more than he did whatever information had been fed to Zola. He assumed that Natalia Alianovna Romanoff was a Red Room created background, but even that couldn’t be certain.

“Less common names would have been quite helpful,” Peggy had said each time she watched Steve pore over SHIELD-provided records of births in Russia. Later, once they had narrowed things down and moved on to the photographs snapped by agents in the area on other assignments, she reminded him carefully that they did not know whether she had been born somewhere rural or at home, without complete records, with a different name, if her parents had perhaps never been in a position to meet at all. But Peggy also never stopped him or told him to give up or refused to transmit his requests. She would have done the same for a missing agent, an untraceable friend.

(There were so many factors and it was still quicksilver confusion, even after all this time, especially after all this time - the changes and their ripples. Twenty-five years ago, he had the SHIELD clipping bureau on a standing assignment for local Iowa birth announcements, ten years ago for circus advertisements. Now he’s moved on to crime blotters, and in the surrounding states too, but he hasn’t found a trace of Clint or his brother. He doesn’t know if they’ve disappeared or if he just hasn’t come across them.)

And then the Volgograd file had been delivered.

She was a year younger than had been claimed, not quite three in the picture he saw and more daughter of Alyona now, considering Ivan had been killed in a car accident before she could walk. Living in an apartment above the family music store, living in a world where the Red Room would never come knocking, where she would grow up entirely different from the person he had known. He had recognized her immediately.

He had told Peggy for several years that he hadn’t needed to see her, that he knew that she was safe and that was enough.

And then she suggested Russia. And suddenly he did want to see.

* * *

They are slightly quieter than usual but only slightly as they return to their hotel to deposit their bags, as they find a restaurant for dinner and chat over their meal (lamb-filled dumplings called beriki for Peggy, a delicious but less adventurous beef stroganoff for Steve), take a short walk and return to their hotel to get ready for bed.

Steve can’t sleep. He lies on his back and stares up at the ceiling until he finally whispers, “Peg? Are you awake?”

Though she’s turned over on her side and burrowed beneath the blankets, she answers immediately and with surprising lucidity. “Well, I was wondering how long you would take.”

“What do you mean?”

She eases over onto her other side to look at him even in the darkness. “You were going to ask me once again if I think that you’ve endangered the world further by shifting the circumstances that resulted in your friends becoming heroes. And I would remind you that people can have perfectly average and non-traumatic childhoods and still find courage within themselves when called for it, and also point out that fortunately, shifting the circumstances has created less of a need for a band of enhanced crime-fighters and will hopefully continue to do so. And then you were to have some sweet and honorable realization about human nature being good at the core and not needing the crucible of damage for that to come out, and you would tell me that I’m correct and kiss me and then finally be able to fall asleep.”

He laughs. “We’ve done this before, huh?”

“Several times,” she says dryly, but not without fondness.

“It’s hard for me to really take it in,” he says, turning toward her too. His voice is serious again. “I keep wondering if I’ve taken away these amazing people who could have been, who could have protected the world if we had made a mess of things.”

“Or,” she points out, equally serious now, “you’ve simply allowed them to be amazing in different ways, and to suffer less as they work toward it.”

He thinks of Bruce, in school even now, still brilliant, with a mother and stepfather he apparently goes to visit over breaks. Steve had glimpsed him once while visiting Drea in Boston. They had passed each other at the Public Gardens entirely by coincidence, Bruce grinning at a friend as they went down into the subway station in a way that Steve almost didn’t recognize, not noticing the man staring at him. He thinks of Sam, still a kid now. Military recruiters don’t come to high schools anymore. He remembers Natasha today, loved and loving, unbounded.

“It’s harder than I thought it would be,” he says. “Thinking of them out in the world, but that I’m the only one who will ever know the versions of them that I did. It’s hard to carry the reality of it alone, even if I think they’re better for it.”

“It’s always been hard, the things we carry, but worthwhile, I think. And necessary.”

He kisses her. “You’re probably right,” he says, stroking a thumb along her temple and brushing the hair back gently from her face.

“Hmm.” She turns back over, settling against him. After a moment she says, “Perhaps someplace warm and relaxing for next year?”

“We’ve tried that. You always say that you want to relax but then end up solving a local murder or getting rid of a corrupt police chief,” Steve points out.

“Well, precisely,” she says, and he laughs and puts an arm around her and allows himself to try for sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry to do kid!Tony and kid!Natasha in such proximity to each other, but that's how it worked out.
> 
> Full disclosure: I did get my info on [Russian dumpling types](https://www.rbth.com/russian-kitchen/327602-pelmeni-all-year-russian--regions-recipes) from Russia Beyond, which is a state-run and at least potentially propagandist site. It also had the most comprehensive breakdown of all the different kinds, which are numerous.


	24. 2008-2009 (1957, 1970)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> BIG cancer warning for this one. Like, it's about cancer.

On Sunday, as they are preparing to eat breakfast, Rose calls and tells them without fanfare that the double mastectomy she’d had two years ago might have held things at bay, but the cancer is back.

“It’ll be worse this time,” she says over speakerphone as Peggy’s toast burns and the kettle whistles without answer. “No more body parts I’m not using to offer up instead. They’re saying it’ll be chemo now, and pretty aggressive.”

(Last time, Rose had decided on mastectomy without much fuss, got through the recovery as quickly as possible, and got back to work. The only real sign of change was that her repertoire of tops and suit jackets, fitted to her sturdy, busty figure, had to be replaced.)

On Monday, before sunset, they arrive in New York. Rose said that her oncologist wanted to get her started very soon, which scared Steve more than anything. Last time the wisdom had been to wait and see, the doctor advising more tests, careful consideration, avoiding jumping into anything, before Rose’s tough and unsentimental practicality had steamrolled that plan. Now they are moving forward with barely enough time for him to process things. Cancer has always been serious, even now, but this seems to be an emergency.

(His kids might have been grown, but Steve was always reminding them all to have regular checkups, to make sure to get their kids vaccinated on time, to get a flu shot each fall. It’s how they caught it so early on Rosie’s annual mammogram the first time. It’s how they found it again now, and Steve is so glad, so glad, so awfully glad.)

Rose greets them in socks, her hair fluffy around her shoulders, wearing her glasses instead of her contacts: nighttime Rosie.

“I told you that you didn’t have to come,” she says, hugging them each anyway.

“Don’t be absurd.” Peggy carries her suitcase through the doorway and back to the guest bedroom. “We’re your parents.”

“She’s right,” Steve tells Rose, who wraps her arms around him again and says, “Thanks, Daddy,” before reaching up to kiss his cheek.

That just terrifies him more.

* * *

_It has been a long while since they had a quiet evening alone, but with Rose sleeping at a friend’s, they take full advantage._

_“Pass the ice cream, would you please?” Peggy licks some of the blueberry filling off the side of her finger as she waits for Steve to slide the container across the table. She scoops a healthy amount onto her pie and observes it with satisfaction before digging in. Her bare legs are crossed politely at the ankle although she’s wearing only one of the button-up pajama tops that Steve refuses to._

_“You should have let me warm the pie first,” Steve says. Disapproval doesn’t quite come out the right way when he is licking ice cream off of his own spoon and can’t stop himself smiling as he does._

_“You’re becoming quite the perfectionist,” she teases. “Are you concerned that Irma Rombauer is peering through our front window?”_

_“I hope not. She’ll spot in a second that I didn’t homemake the ice cream.” He is lifting another spoonful of the local dairy’s excellent product to his mouth when the phone rings. There is a standoff where neither of them moves, unwilling to disrupt the moment, but then Steve sighs and answers._

_Three minutes later, he is fully dressed again, back in the kitchen to find his keys._

_“And Mrs. Solomon didn’t specify when was wrong?” Peggy asks. She’s returned the ice cream to the freezer while he was gone and is sitting in her chair again, the pie untouched on her plate. “Rose was fine this morning.”_

_“As if she would have mentioned if she wasn’t. And risk missing the big sleepover?” Steve finds his keys beneath the mail on the kitchen counter._

_“Well, then, I’m afraid she might be dying.” Despite the attempted sarcasm, Steve can hear the worry beneath her tone. She looks up at him and takes his hand as he walks past. “We did have a good reason for deciding to become parents, didn’t we? Because I’m finding this sort of constant concern quite unpleasant.”_

_Steve kisses her upturned mouth. “Comes with the territory, I think,” he says. “But so do the good parts.”_

_Rose comes home, sleepy and exasperated and a little teary from the pain that Steve has expertly diagnosed as a common ear infection, held in her father’s arms. Her mother, clad now in her sensible dressing gown (though her hair is still strewn about her shoulders), prescribes a hot bath and some late night blueberry pie. By the time she has finished her portion, Rosie is laughing._

_She falls asleep in her parents’ bed, snug between them. Peggy strokes her hair._

_“Oh, yes,” she says fondly. “The good parts.”_

* * *

The first few sessions are not as bad as he had feared. Rose feels fine after the first, tired after the second, a little under the weather after the third.

The fourth is like a truck hit her.

Peggy holds her hair back as Rose kneels in front of the toilet, smoothing a palm over her forehead. She cannot keep her hand steady enough to shave the hair off with the electric razor that Rose insistently sent Steve to pick up at Duane Reade. She blames her age. Steve catches a breath beneath the buzz of the razor because for Peggy to claim such a thing, her fear must be worse than he had ever considered.

Steve makes soup endlessly. His mother’s recipe is not so much that as it is instructions consisting of “Put whatever you have that seems appropriate in the pot, add water, don’t be afraid of salt, keep it on the flame until it smells good.” But he always admired her transformation of what were essentially bones and scraps into something that did smell good. He’d found comfort in it, in the way she’d come home tired and still try to fill up the house with warmth for him. He knows he’s trying to do the same for Rose, even as she asks for smaller and smaller portions.

They don’t spend all of their time in the apartment, going together for Rose’s appointments and treatments whenever they’re scheduled. The hospital is better than Steve remembered, better than he thought it would be: plastic has replaced creaky and unwelcoming metal, nurses walk the halls in their scrubs and tired smiles rather than walling themselves in starch and impatience. People so often walk out healthy. Rose has a comfortable armchair and popsicles from the freezer nearby when she wants them.

He sits there, beside that comfortable chair, watching his daughter being filled up with poison that is meant to save her.

Science has given him his life so many times over. It gave him _this_ life. He tries to trust it. He can’t stand what it is doing to her.

The worst part is watching her get fuzzy and unfocused. “Chemo brain,” the nurses tell them. “It’s normal.” But this isn’t normal for Rose, who was so obviously smart even in those furious months right after she’d come home to them, who takes such pride in a case well-argued and a strategy well-built. She takes leave from work when it is obvious that she won’t be able to manage much for now.

“I think this is the longest vacation I’ve had in years,” she tries to joke as she puts on her headphones and starts a new romance audiobook. She’s found a series that she can enjoy even if she tunes in and out.

Peggy is the one who keeps track of the appointments and medications, who consults with the doctors and then consults with them again, with slow and charming menace, when she thinks that she might not have gotten the full story. Steve is the one who holds Peggy at night as she readies herself for another day.

“I thought we had passed the difficult parts of parenting,” she says against his shoulder one night. She is not crying, but her breath shudders in and out.

“I think we got the difficult parts forever when we signed up.” He looks up at the ceiling, knowing how the streetlights will peek through the blinds. This room might be theirs at this point.

“If I could--” he starts quietly. He doesn’t know how to continue: if he could trade places with Rose? If he could transfer some sort of healing ability to her instead? If he could give up anything to make her well? But he knows that it’s all true.

Peggy nods against him. “I would as well.”

They see other parents at the hospital, oftentimes with patients younger than Rose. It is not arrogance to say that none of them have had the life experience that Steve and Peggy have. Their eyes still look the same.

* * *

_Rose comes home from her first semester at Smith and gets the flu immediately. All her vacation plans are put on hold as she lies in bed, first groggy, then grumpy._

_“Dad!” Steve hears her call from where he is in the kitchen, having remembered to put together a lunch tray for her. Rose’s semester might have ended, but he is still in the midst of final papers and exams. Now that he is in his master’s program, he somehow doesn’t quite have the confidence he gained over the past four years as an undergraduate. He’s trying to do everything exactly right, and keeps having to unbury himself from his work to check on Rosie._

_“Can you please sit with me?” she begs as soon as he comes into the room. He sets the tray on her lap and leans to feel her forehead. Still cool, though her voice sounds raspy and there are tissues scattered around her nightstand._

_“Do you need something?” he asks._

_“Someone to talk to, please,” she says fervently. “I’m not going to try to pretend I’m ready to leave the house, but I’m absolutely bored to death.”_

_Steve spots the novel she’s tossed to the end of the bed in agitation, its pages fallen pathetically open. “I can see that,” he says wryly. He thinks of the pile of work downstairs, his notes and textbooks and the essay half finished in the typewriter. He thinks of himself in bed during all those long hours when Bucky and his mother were busy, when he had finished all of his library books and hadn’t gotten a new batch, when even his careful conservation efforts had left him without art supplies and there wasn’t quite enough stretch to his mother’s paycheck for anything new. He remembers watching out of the window during all those hours, listening to the games down on the street and imagining the taste of the blue of the sky._

_“I certainly know what that’s like,” he tells Rose, at which she snorts and says, “Okay, Dad, as if you ever get sick.”_

_How strange it is, to hear her say that. “Let me get a deck of cards,” he says hastily._

_Between bites of her grilled cheese, Rose beats him at several hands of gin rummy, then they switch to War and she tells him what college has been like behind her excitement and the confidence she shows her sisters and brother: that she sat through her first real lecture and found that everyone else was already giving answers before she even thought of the questions, the time she attended a formal dinner with the faculty and nearly knocked a candlestick over onto the beautifully set table, how she had only managed to get a chorus part in the play but the other girls there ended up becoming her best friends. After enough stories and a few games of War, she is even willing to play chess with him, something she swore years ago that she would never do again. But he catches sight of the clock as he goes to get the board and realizes that it’s time to go pick up Emma from school. When they get back, Nate and Drea are home, curled up beside the bed talking to Rosie, and Emma races up to join them. He watches her with a bit of longing before he goes to the kitchen to start dinner._

_He has to stay up late that night to finish his own work, but it’s all worth it._

* * *

There are plenty of visitors. The Barneses and the Starks are local, and so call asking if they can drop by often. (There’s a week where Tony shows up nearly every day, apparently having decided that “visiting a cancer patient” is some sort of excuse for procrastination. He gets back to it, pouting, when he realizes that Pepper has been handling things entirely fine without him and has barely even noticed that he wasn’t showing up.)

Drea and her family come from Boston every other weekend if they can, and Emma and Nate usually trade off coming up on the alternate weeks. When Rose is at her worst, Steve and Peggy ask whether it’s a good idea to allow their grandchildren to see her that way. Despite choosing not to have children of her own (she claimed she was “too busy and too selfish” for it), she has always been an excellent aunt, treating her nephews and nieces to Broadway shows, shopping sprees, and meals out whenever they made it to New York, always available for catching up over the phone or convincing a parent of some scheme when asked. As difficult as it is to realize, though, even the grandchildren are all grown or nearly there. Tess will turn 16 in just a couple of months, and although they still think of Julie as the baby, she will follow suit before the end of the year. And even if they weren’t, would it really be healthier to quarantine them from her as if she was dying?

Besides, it is clearly good for Rose to be surrounded by the people who love her. She might let comments fly by without a smart retort or drift off to sleep if a treatment’s taken a lot out of her, but she always smiles when she wakes up and finds her family talking over one another and chattering about every possible topic.

It isn’t just family, either. When people show up at Rose’s place or the hospital, Steve recognizes some of them, like Rose’s old secretary. Others are strangers, though they go out of their way to introduce themselves to him.

“She came to speak to my class in law school,” one of the associates from Rose’s firm tells him. “Just leaned back on the desk, crossed her arms, and said, ‘So, human rights,’ and I knew immediately that I needed to work with her.”

There’s the middle aged woman and her teenaged daughter who seem to have a million private jokes with Rose although they apparently met when they spent three nights in Rose’s guest bedroom on an emergency referral from the domestic violence organization she’s been working with since after college. There’s another woman, a friend of a friend, who stayed three months after she lost her job and was evicted from her former apartment. One of Rosie’s college friends comes by at least once a week.

“She was there for me when I was going through the same thing,” she says when Peggy asks delicately whether they’re keeping her from something else. “My kids had dinner that I didn’t have to cook practically every night of my treatment because she was there organizing it.” She laughs. “Not doing the actual cooking, though, thank goodness.”

On the cab ride back one evening - just the two of them; Peggy is already back at the apartment - Rose leans herself drowsily on Steve’s shoulder. He runs a hand over her hair, which has grown back down around her ears by now. (She thinks it makes her look like an awkward thirteen-year-old, but is persevering until it’s at a more flattering length.)

“I’m so proud of you,” he says, very quietly, although he isn’t certain she’s awake enough to hear him. “What you’ve built for yourself here...It’s so special.”

“Well, I learned it from you,” she murmurs.

“Hmm?”

“You remember that time--I must have been with you and Mom for four, five months. I woke up in the night and I _knew_ that I was going to throw up. And I just lay there, hoping that if I didn’t move, it wouldn’t happen.

“I’m still not sure how you realized - I was so careful not to move or make any noise - but you came into the room, this big shadow in the darkness, and asked if I was okay. And I started to cry a little, so you picked me up, and I absolutely--I hadn’t known I could puke so much. It was all over you. And you just went, “Oh,” and then you asked me if I was feeling better. You got everything cleaned up - bath, teeth brushed, new pajamas and sheets, big bowl next to the bed just in case - and after you went to change, you gave me some seltzer and rubbed my back until I fell asleep. And when I woke up, you were still sitting right where you had been. It was the first time I could remember that kind of love being given to me, that support of just being there.”

Steve swallows. He racks his memory and can think of a million little examples of Rose having been sick - the summer cold that kept her trapped inside instead of playing, the stomach virus that she passed on to the rest of the kids - but he can’t seem to grasp onto that one. It’s escaping him, this first moment of his daughter knowing that he loved her.

“Your friends,” he says, “are so lucky to have you. Everyone is. And I’m so lucky to have played any part in it.”

* * *

When Steve and Peggy finally go home, the house is cold and smells unfamiliar. It hasn’t been entirely untouched while they’ve been in New York - they’ve been back for brief visits, and Emma and Eric, and Nate and Eleanor, all live close enough to have checked on things occasionally - but it’s like stepping into a pair of shoes unworn for a long while. They turn on more lights than necessary, and Steve makes an aromatic stew and fresh bread for dinner.

Rose’s oncologist is incredibly pleased with her progress. The chemo seems to be doing its job, and with time and medication to help manage them, her side effects have, blessedly, lessened. She’s gained back a significant amount of energy, started working again - mostly behind the scenes and sometimes from home, but building up to the number of hours she puts in each week - and is on track to finish her chemo in a few more months.

They had almost decided to stay for the duration, but Rose’s network of friends had assured them that they could keep things covered for the next while until she is - please, please - allowed to stop regular treatment.

Peggy sits, stirring her bowl of stew and looking around at the kitchen. It’s changed since they first moved in, appliances obviously updated, but the paint and wallpaper and tile refreshed too.

One day, when it is someone else’s, they won’t know about the places where Emma and Nate colored on the walls, or about the burn on the counter from when Drea put down the Thanksgiving turkey directly out of the oven. They won’t see the traces of Rose’s dubious kitchen experimentation, won’t know about all of the family dinners and the laughter and the squabbling.

“They’ve been grown so much longer than they were children--” she says

“But for us they still are. Always will be.” Steve smiles, soft and tired and loving. “Was it worth it? Knowing what you do now about how hard it would be?”

She takes his hand and echoes his own thoughts back at him: “I would do it over again in a heartbeat. All of it. In a heartbeat.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Resources for this chapter:
> 
>   * Some info on [cancer treatment](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2395300/) and [mastectomies](https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/fear-of-breast-cancer-recurrence-prompting-women-to-choose-prophylactic-mastectomy-201212055619). Got a lot of good information about breast cancer treatment in the mid-2000s from [this blog](http://www.butdoctorihatepink.com/).
>   * [Oral histories from Smith College alumnae from the 1970s](https://media.smith.edu/departments/archives/alumoh/playlists/1970s.html)! (Oh, that’s only exciting for me? That’s fine.)
> 



	25. 1953 (1963)

Steve decides to start a garden.

“What in the world do you know about plants?” Peggy asks incredulously when he tells her as they eat breakfast one morning. “The first time you bought me flowers, you interrogated the florist in such detail that poor Frances felt the need to catch me in the street and ask me if you were quite alright.”

Their new house came with landscaping in the front yard - grass and trees and bushes which Steve is learning to keep in good condition, if only to avoid disapproving looks from a few particular neighbors - but the back is open and plain, surrounded by a high fence. There is something about the emptiness, the crumbling dirt, that makes Steve want to fill it with life.

Their local librarian guides him over to the 635 section, where a respectable collection of gardening guides lines the shelves. He thanks her and begins picking through them.

These are the times where he misses the future. The internet had certainly caused no end of problems, but it could be so helpful too. How much simpler to be able to search “best plants for first time gardener New Jersey,” or to order a niche book on gardening for novices. Gardening for amateurs. Gardening for complete beginners.

Instead he has several rejected guides on creating Japanese gardens, a ragged victory garden handbook dirt-smeared on half of its remaining pages, a specialist’s handbook for peonies, one for roses, several for flowers he hasn’t even heard of. How to start your own apple orchard.

He ends up checking out a copy of _The Lazy Gardener_ , hoping that that it will be close enough to what he needs. He pages through it on the bus. There are good tips in there, but the author seems to spend a lot of time dramatizing his wars with weeds and garden pests and detailing all the sweat he produces while doing his allegedly lazy gardening. He wants something more along the lines of “here is what mulch is and when to use it.”

The plant nursery at the edge of town is better.

“You’re a bit late in the season if you’re looking to start spinach or broccoli, but you can certainly get your carrots and peppers in on time,” says Mr. Westervelt.

“And tomatoes, of course,” adds Mrs. Westervelt. “And squash. Any new gardener will want those. Were you thinking of flowers too?”

“Yes, but--” He gestures at the options around them. “I don’t know what to choose.”

Mr. Westervelt adjusts his thick spectacles. “Tell me now, how much space are you working with, son?”

Thankfully, Steve had thought to measure before he left. Otherwise he wouldn’t have much to contribute.

He’s back the next day, and the next week too, paging through catalogues with Mrs. Westervelt, showing the prospective layout he drafted at the dining room table the night before, getting tips from Mrs. MacMillan and Mr. Costa. (According to the Westervelts, there’s no one better to ask for advice separately, and no one worse when they’re together: the two of them have been competing for the title of best gardener in town for about thirty years and will contradict the other’s advice just for the sake of having their own opinion.)

“First Al and Oliver, and now this. I know that it’s confusing between it all, but you are still a young man. Yet you seem drawn to older people,” Peggy comments. She has come down to the kitchen still in her pajamas with disheveled hair - a rarity; she’s usually ready to face the day before she steps foot downstairs - and wraps her arms around him from behind as he checks the plant pots he has lining the counter.

He brings one of her hands from where it rests against the skin of his chest up to his mouth. He kisses the back, her fingers. “In some ways I feel old too. But...For all that time and all I’ve seen, I think I don’t always feel certain. I like being with people who’ve lived through so much and seem to know what they’re about.”

“Well they certainly know this. And look.” She comes around to his side, leaning her hip against him. His arm wraps around her shoulder automatically. She gestures with her head to where the first lacy, pale green evidence of life is sprouting up. “They’re helping you make something new.”

* * *

Without asking, without being told, Steve comes back from the store, puts the groceries away, and decides that today is the day to put his plants in the ground.

He’d done the more difficult soil preparation a few weeks ago, so today is just for transferring the plants. He anticipates that it will be a relatively easy job. But the weather warms even more as the day goes on and he strips to his undershirt before long.

The diagram that he’d drawn, finalized in his pen and annotated with his friends’ recommendations, sits by the back door, but he doesn’t need to look at it, doesn’t flip open the notebook where he’s been jotting advice about soil dampness and ideal fertilizer. He can picture where everything will go and how he will get it there.

Despite the size of the yard and the relatively small number of plants, the afternoon slides away as he brings over each sprout, takes care with the roots as he removes them as gently as he can, settles them within the new soil. How strange, how lovely, that only a few weeks ago, they were only seeds, that they have spent this time hidden away stretching outward and _becoming_.

He knows the afternoon is getting later from the movement of the sun overhead, the sweat slipping down the back of his neck. He knows that he can stop, wash up, cook, finish later, but he keeps planting.

And then Peggy opens the screen door and steps down into the yard, shading her eyes with a hand.

“Is there anything left for me to help with?”

“Your dress--” he starts as she kneels beside him. His own knees are stained and damp.

She waves him off, a smile flicking at the corners of her mouth. “It will wash.”

“But who will be doing the washing?” he reminds her, smiling back before pointing to the remaining tomato sprout.

Her hands sink into the earth beside his to make a space.

* * *

When they sell the house, Steve shows the new owners the yard himself, listing some of the different plants he’s tried and which have worked best, talking about sun and shade and water, mentioning that they’d had the place nearly entirely as garden space before the kids needed somewhere to play (and to learn how to throw a punch).

“I think it will be a real treat, having all of these wonderful things we grow ourselves,” says Mrs. Shapiro, beaming. She was the one who had expressed interest. Steve hopes that she’ll stay interested.

It’s late summer, not the right time to pack up any of the plants, transfer them into pots and protect them carefully for the trip. He’ll need new vegetables in the spring, the right varieties for the light and soil and weather of the Maryland house. He does have some bulbs packed away, some of his own, some from his friends: daffodils, crocuses, Peggy’s favorite lilies. He’s checked and thinks they’ll take in the new environment. He can picture the kids with their hands in the dirt, Rose taking the expert role, bossing everyone, and Emma reminding her to do the work as well, the new additions learning it all for the first time. When they get to their new home, when they’re settled, he can start again. He knows the way now.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [New Jersey vegetable planting calendar!](https://www.ufseeds.com/learning/planting-schedules/new-jersey-vegetable-planting-calendar/)
> 
>  
> 
> [The Lazy Gardener (1947)](https://books.google.com/books?id=FF5DAAAAIAAJ&q)!


	26. 1967

Peggy tries to put on a good face during dinner, but he can tell that something is wrong. He knows it could be plenty of things; she’s been strained recently, the world coming at her from all sides. Even with his forewarning, the situation in the Middle East is barely holding together, and they were just discussing the other night the discovery of an ex-SHIELD agent shopping around a tell-all spy memoir. Still, he has the feeling that it’s something else, something larger that’s troubling her, that has been hanging in the background for a while and is now bursting into disastrous life.

Even the kids notice. Drea waves across the table to get her attention, and when nothing happens, Rose waves a hand as well, then Emma, until finally Nate touches Peggy’s shoulder and she shakes herself into awareness.

“I assume you’re all begging for the vegetables?” she asks, exaggerating the clenching of her fingers and raising an eyebrow to convey her sarcasm before lifting the dish. The kids laugh, but Steve notices them watching her for the rest of the evening.

He doesn’t bring it up while he washes the dishes, or sits to do his schoolwork. (He hadn’t had the time between his afternoon class, starting dinner, and helping the kids with theirs). Peggy takes a chair nearby, a novel held in her hand. When Steve looks up to stretch or give her a little smile, he notices the small muscles shifting beside her mouth, the tensed set of her fingers.

“Mom, tell Drea to give me back my book, I was just about to read it!” Rose hollers from her bedroom upstairs, despite the number of times they’ve tried to get them all to stop doing that.

“She hasn’t even started it and I’m just getting to the good part,” Drea yells defensively.

Peggy grimaces and stands. Steve stands too, wrapping an arm around her so that she stops moving toward the stairs. He kisses her mouth, then her forehead. “Let me take care of it.” She nods, and that’s when he knows that whatever she has to tell him will be worse than he’d feared.

He solves the fight between Rose and Drea pretty quickly (Drea gets to finish the chapter, but won’t take Rose’s things without asking) but then immediately gets sucked into the chaos of getting everyone to bed. The routine is a marathon these days: reading with Nate and Emma first, a chapter each once their pajamas are on and teeth are brushed ( _The Mouse and the Motorcycle_ for Emma, _Green Knowe_ for Nate), before moving immediately over to knock on the bathroom door to remind Rosie to stop making faces at herself in the mirror, then going to sit on the edge of Drea’s bed and talk about her day before she turns out her light, another knock for Rosie so that she huffs out in her pajamas looking put upon, Drea coming blearily out with some concern (tonight’s: she wants to make sure that they’ll remember to buy a gift for Samara’s birthday party this weekend), a reminder to Rose that she can stay up in her room for another half hour as long as she doesn’t play her music too loudly, and finally he can go see Peggy.

(He misses those nights of just him and Peggy keeping each other company. He misses the kids gathering into one bed, piling on top of each other as he read to them all. He rubs a hand across his eyes. Rosie is in high school now, and somehow in the last year, Drea has decided that she doesn’t need someone to read to her anymore either.)

Peggy has her shoes off but remains dressed otherwise. Her blouse is even still tucked in. She looks up as he enters the room and closes the door behind him.

“Are you sick?” he asks, coming to sit beside her on the bed. He takes her hand, holding it loosely in both of his, but she takes it back, resting her palms back on the bed and leaning onto them. “Is it something with the kids?”

She shakes her head and gives a little laugh. “Only very indirectly, I suppose.” She stares ahead and doesn’t speak for a moment, then takes in a deep breath and begins. “We knew, of course, that there were Nazis who escaped, even some of the worst. And we knew that we haven’t come close to rooting all of them out or having even the slightest notion of where they might be. There are other people who have made that their job, and we help them when we can.”

Steve nods. He knows all of this.

“Last month, an informant came forward to the intelligence community. He had led a pair Nazi hunters to a village in Uruguay. A colleague of theirs came looking soon after, and he gave the same information. None of those people he had told about the village have been seen since.”

A lot of the Nazi hunters are Holocaust survivors, doing work that most of the world has already moved on from. Steve starts to feel a little sick.

“There is a way of seeing protocol,” Peggy continues carefully, “as having us report the information to the United Nations. But the delays, the probability of leaks, the potential for some sort of symbolic action only...none of us wanted that. We contacted the government in Montevideo directly, but with the election upcoming, they told us that it was too precarious a time to take on such a thing. They agreed to allow us to send a small military team, for surveillance and information-gathering at first, but for capture or elimination if necessary. That team has disappeared as well. We assume that they are dead.”

She takes another breath. “Despite my misgivings, I agreed to send a group from SHIELD to attempt another assessment of the threat. Howard and the lab equipped them with continuously broadcasting radios that worked even in very remote locations. The audio that we received…” Steve finds himself sitting very still, animal, as she soldiers on. “It seems that they are entirely suspicious and unwelcoming of outsiders, so there’s little opportunity for infiltration. They’re Nazis, a group of them, we’re absolutely certain, and what’s more, I’m fairly sure that they’ve scavenged some of Hydra’s technological remainders. Obviously without the Tesseract they don’t have quite the supernatural lethality, but whatever they have is overwhelming even well-trained operatives.”

“What about more significant military action?” The words, crisp and professional, surprise even him.

“With enough equipment and force, we could likely overpower them. But the Uruguayan government won’t commit their military before the election, and I’m concerned that the threat is growing too quickly to wait months. Sending in American troops, even if it is agreed upon, will undermine the work I’ve done in holding the line against constant military intervention in Central and South America. ‘It seems Director Carter would just like to lead us around without following her own advice.’ Never mind that this is about genocidaires, war crimes, not to mention the potential existential threat, not about propping up—” She brings herself up straight, presses the side of a hand to her eyes, then drops them both to her lap. She looks at him with deliberateness, taking a deep breath, and he knows what she is about to ask.

“Before I go, I’d like to listen to the broadcasts you have,” he says before she can, before she has to. His voice is calm, secure, as far as he knows; it is as if he is hearing it from afar. “I know I’m not authorized for it, but I’m probably not authorized for this conversation either.”

She looks at him with such sadness. Her lips, still their signature red even after a long day, lie parted instead of pressing together to call up composure. But she takes what he has given her, and goes on.

“I can have Howard make copies of the recordings if you’d prefer to listen to them here, but you can come into the office if you’d rather.” He’s usually busy enough throughout the day, but he has come to visit her at work before; it’s not unheard of for them to go into her office and close the door and have any staff nearby take a long lunch. “We would keep your name out of it completely: you would work under an alias, and we would give you false documents. I would refer to you as an outside contractor; I don’t think the other intelligence heads are as engaged with this as I am and I can likely get it past them. Any other operatives we would allow into that field wouldn’t be informed of who you are. I would make sure that—” She catches in a breath. “I would make sure that after this is finished, there isn’t a trace left that it ever happened.”

 _You will be able to return to this life we’ve built, slip right back into it without a thought_ , is what she is saying, what she is trying to promise him. Steve looks around at their room: their matching firm pillows, the towel he had tossed indifferently over the side of the laundry basket that morning, the photos on the nightstand, Peggy’s cosmetics carefully lining her vanity, her hairbrush angled at the front. He knows that no matter what even she can manage, no matter what happens in Uruguay, when he comes back, it will all look a little different, a little unfamiliar. “It’s okay, Peg,” he says simply. “This is important.”

“I’ve already selected a group who would be good candidates to accompany you, if you wanted them,” she says. “I can tell them in the morning.”

“That would be good.” Even when he was in practice rather than simply relying on enhancement and old reflexes, he had so often worked with a team. He thinks about the shield, locked away beneath the ice. He knows the coordinates where he had been found the first time. Howard bought the land around it years ago, hiding it among other seemingly random purchasing whims, just to make sure that no one else would happen upon that spot. In the back of Steve’s mind, he had idly thought that it would be a good spot for climate research in the upcoming years, assuming that he could successfully steer Howard in that direction. Now he considers the place in a new light: the time for the trip there and back, the machinery involved (drills, something, he doesn’t know), the secrecy, the way he would be robbing his own grave if he did such a thing. “I’ll need to talk to Howard about...equipment, too.”

She gives a bare nod, but is quiet, as if she’s finally come to the end of what she has been forcing out. She only speaks again a moment later. Her tone is low and he thinks only he could hear the sob beneath it. She places a hand on his cheek. “I’m so sorry. I thought I would be able to keep all of it away from you. I promised you that. My job requires that I send people into danger, but you...I never wanted to have to ask this of you.”

“It’s okay,” he repeats. “It’s okay. I know you did what you could. And now it’s my turn.”

And she must believe him, at least a little, at least enough, or at least she can pretend, because when he takes her hand again, she lets him keep it. She slides her fingers among his and does not let him go.

* * *

He spends ten days training while the kids are at school. Peggy says they have the time for that, at least. He misses classes while he does it, lets his professors know that he has an important personal matter to attend to over the next several weeks. They’re mostly understanding. He sends in assignments by mail when he’s able. He’ll take summer classes to make up whatever he needs to if it comes to that.

He thinks of the summer with both longing and disbelief. It is only a few months away in true time, but unfathomably far when he can’t think past the mission counting its way down toward him.

They tell the kids that he’s been offered an opportunity for a short field study with one of his professors. Although he knows that he should be savoring it, storing up these memories, for the first time his children’s laughter, their teasing, is bitter to him. Because it will be so easy for him to die there, and if he does, this lie will be the last thing they know of him.

Peggy drives him to the airport. He watches her hands - their painted nails, their steadiness on the wheel - and her eyes as she drives. When they arrive, she follows him out of the car, leaves the door open in front of the terminal, kisses him gently, then ferociously, pressing up into him, then gently again. She is so much more familiar to him than when they did this once before. Somehow he thinks the ache is worse this time: then he wondered at the possibility of what they might have had, but now he knows that future intimately and trembles at the thought of losing it.

She bends her head for a moment, rests her forehead against the open collar of his shirt. “You have a startlingly good track record for successfully coming back to me,” she says against him. “Don’t let’s ruin things now, hmm?”

“I don’t plan to,” is all he can manage. He doesn’t feel solid enough for promises.

* * *

He flies from DC to New York, then down to Buenos Aires. The agent barely examines his beautifully faked passport before stamping it, and no one (thankfully) checks his suitcase.

The rest of the team is already in place: a group of six, all professional operatives who look him over and simply nod.

They have their own leader, a reasonable man who meets with Steve to plot out their strategy on the hours driving north and later hiking up into the lower parts of the mountains. The way he talks about the rest of the group is appealing - he makes clear their strengths, assigns them where they’ll be most useful, never tries any of the put-downs disguised as ribbing that Steve’s seen from commanders before.

They don’t need to calculate coordinates to know when they arrive. It’s a while since they’ve seen much of anything and then there it is: carved into wilderness with an arched metal gate that might be blank but makes Steve stare and set his jaw.

There are cameras. They could have guessed that there would be, but Steve’s heard the recordings too. “I think they’re watching us,” said one voice to another, pitched soft, horribly young. Steve had put his head in his hands.

There’s no time for that now. The others look to him. He gives the nod. Lowry nods back, an explosive already in hand. She pitches it, the first move, and they begin.

* * *

In the heat of it, there is familiarity. The stand-in shield Howard made isn’t truly like the original - the alloy he’s created is strong and still lightweight, but it isn’t vibranium - and yet Steve falls into patterns that his body somehow remembers. The instinct of when to swing forward, when to duck, how to use the surroundings against your opponents...these things have not gone away the way he thought they had.

The rest of his team is highly trained, armed with excellent weapons, and, even with his help, at a distinct disadvantage, and not only because the enemy has excellent weapons of their own.

There is an echo of himself in the men Steve fights, and he pictures Dr. Erskine’s face. Not in that last moment, bleeding on the floor, but before then: weary and wise, with a bit of mischief. How it would have destroyed him to know that these are the broken, brutal remains of his work.

And Steve pushes on, Erskine’s true legacy. He fights for those beside him who he has promised himself he will see home, fights for the right in the world as he always has. He leaves a man shattered on the ground and remembers Emma’s high, delighted giggles overlapping with each other, her kiss to his cheek as he had left. A blow to the gut and he pictures Drea squinting at the pitcher with determination as she comes up to bat. He blocks a bullet with his shield and flashes to Rosie’s surprisingly dreamy face when he had come to pick her up from painting scenery late one afternoon. In the moment when he sees one of his men fall, a broken promise, he thinks of Nate’s hand slipping into his at a street corner, his small, sturdy voice.

And he pushes on, Peggy filling his mind, Peggy asleep and wakeful and waking, Peggy determined and forceful, thinking, listening to him by the radio as he knows she must be now. Peggy in her office, Peggy in her favorite chair at home, Peggy in the yard with sun in her hair, Peggy with his name alight in her mouth.

And he pushes on, for the world and all of them within it, and for himself too.

* * *

On the ride from the airport, he ponders saying that he is tired and going to go straight to bed. And it’s true in some ways, as he considers the bodies on their way back to SHIELD to be prepared and returned to the families for burial, as he thinks of the work still ahead ensuring that Hydra is truly gone, as he thinks about whether this was something that had happened the first time without his knowledge or whether rooting out Zola and the others had just made the problem more vicious and secretive. (He does not know, even when he closes his eyes to sleep, what he will see in his dreams.)

But he walks into the hallway of his home and holds his arms open for his kids as they run to meet him. He sees his textbooks stacked on the bookshelf, their knowledge ready to fill him, to offer an opportunity for debate, to prepare him to do a new and different sort of good in the world. (He will be early for class tomorrow.)

Peggy steps into the lighted doorway of the kitchen, drying her hands on the apron she is wearing. She wades past the children clamoring around them and he meets her, her fingers against his forearms, his mouth against hers. Even once they’ve parted, she holds his face between her palms.

“How are you, my darling?”

He takes in a breath. The children have darted into the kitchen, enticed by dinner or somehow knowing that their parents need a moment. “Through to the other side. But I think I could—I can do it again, if you needed me too.”

She tilts her head thoughtfully. There are lines beside her eyes these days. He wants to trace them, with his finger, with his mouth, to make sure that he remembers each one. “I know better now,” she says, “than to say I will never need you again. But for now, I think you’re needed here.”

He nods, but she does not wait for it. She takes him by the hand and leads him toward the kitchen too, toward the glow and warmth and love there.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Flights to South America in the 1960s](http://www.timetableimages.com/ttimages/av2/av67/) \- hurray for niche interests tbh
> 
> I had mentioned very briefly back in chapter 2 that Steve had done some work for Peggy when necessary. Not super easy, though.


	27. 1964

_The more things change_ , Steve thinks comfortably, and it’s true. For all the modern cars he can spot lining the streets, the changing fashions, the sounds of TVs through the windows which have mostly replaced the radios, he might as well be back in short pants.

“Here,” Bucky says, coming through the front door and hooking it closed with his foot (he’s not wearing the arm today) before he starts down the steps. He hands Steve a beer, which Steve clinks automatically against the one remaining in Bucky’s hand. “Everyone still in one piece?”

Steve lifts his eyebrows toward where the kids are running, shrieking and giggling, through the water arcing from the fire hydrant. “I don’t know if I’d be able to tell if someone started screaming for real.”

“Yeah, you would.” Bucky sits, taking a sip of his beer, and Steve can see his eyes searching out Libby’s toddler form between the taller ones of the Carters and her Barnes cousins. They both spot her at the same time, tucked behind Rose and Baby, using them as a shield so she gets only dainty amounts of water on her feet and hair. She claps her damp hands and looks over at Bucky, palms out, smiling. Bucky sets down his bottle to wave back to her.

“Father of the year over here,” Steve says, grinning, and Bucky elbows him.

“Never learned to shut your mouth, did you?”

Steve shrugs elaborately. “Lesson was never smacked into me hard enough, I guess.”

Bucky snorts and takes another swig of beer. “I’m sure my mother will be happy to give it a try.”

“Hmm.” Steve looks at the bottle he’s holding between his palms. He isn’t in the mood to joke about Winifred Barnes considering the way she has avoided using Drea’s name since they’ve been back in Brooklyn. It wasn’t meant to be a surprise for her - Steve knows that Bucky’s talked to her about it - but her reaction has been more disapproving than he would have expected. Josie and Vi have, after all, been together nearly as long as he and Peggy have, and while it isn’t precisely acknowledged, they’ve always been treated warmly regardless of what the church might have to say about it. He knows his wife has already had some harsh words with Winifred about the sort of love parents - and, by extension, grandparents - are meant to show their children, but she’s been stubborn in her opinions about what kind of parents they are to support this. They haven’t been back to her house since that first day. At this point Steve’s had Winifred, teasing and reprimanding and caretaking, longer than he had his own mother, but the way she’s acting is wrong and he won’t force any of his kids through her coldness.

“Hey, I’m sorry,” Bucky says, tone no longer joking. “I didn’t think--”

“Not your fault.” Steve summons up a smile and changes the topic. “You need any help getting the nursery freshened up while we’re here? Plenty of us to give you a hand if you need one.”

“I trust Carter with a hammer before I trust you—”

“Probably a good idea.”

“—but she’s been in and out of meetings with Howard nearly the whole time you’ve been here.” Steve’s mouth pulls to the side; he had hoped that she would be able to relax a little once they’d arrived, but the relentless pace of her work seems to have followed them up from Washington. “And I’m not making those kids of yours work during their summer vacation, especially when only half of them are any bigger than the hammer. Besides, I’ve got months.”

“Check your calendar, pal. Baby’s due in October and that’s coming up fast.”

“I know when my baby’s due, you punk.”

“Better not let Layla hear you with this ‘my baby’ stuff.”

“Then you’d better not let it slip.” Bucky finishes off his beer, puts the bottle off to the side, and plucks Steve’s out of his grasp. They both know Steve hates the taste of the stuff anyway and only holds it because he likes the feeling: sitting here with the sun warm on his head and neck, watching his children play in these familiar streets, his best friend beside him, a cold beer in hand.

(It is never difficult for Steve to appreciate the normal, wonderful things. He knows just how close he came - a million times, a million different ways - to not having any of it.)

Their move to Maryland was necessary and they’ve settled into a good life there, the kids doing well in school, finding friends, Peggy somehow forcing time amidst all her other work to design the new DC SHIELD headquarters. Steve’s gotten to know the employees at the grocery and the politics of his new local PTA group. Still, he misses being able to just drop by and watch Bucky at work or get scolded out of Layla’s lab, misses phoning on a Saturday morning and having them over for dinner that night. When the new baby is born, he won’t be around for things the way he was with Libby. He’ll be Uncle Steve from afar, mostly.

And yet now that they’ve come back, it’s like there was no time away. He falls back into step with Bucky, back into bantering with Becca and teasing smiles out of Josie, back into the patterns of these streets and alleyways, as if he’d never left. These are things embedded within him, things not even about blood shed beside each other but instead the bone-level knowing, deep as a nursery rhyme, that he would always have a place with them.

That sort of familiarity was how Bucky, the other Bucky, had known that he wasn’t simply going to return the stones. A few evenings after the funeral, once most people had departed, Bruce said that he would be ready to set up the next day and Steve nodded. Later that night, he and Bucky had both come up with pretenses to pull each other aside, out into the gentle air. The night had been shadowed by trees, barely crescent-mooned.

“I don’t think I’m coming back,” Steve finally shored himself up enough to say, just in time for Bucky to comment, “So, you’re probably not coming back, right?”

And he had been calm about it, prepared, that gentle look to his eye, that tilt to his head. The understanding of old soldiers who had come a long way, the determination of one ready to keep fighting on his own terms. He’d squeezed Steve’s shoulder. “Live a good life,” he said. “And if you see me there, do what you think is right, okay?”

All the trust in the world in those words, and Steve knew that it was permission to kill him if necessary, to leave only that time as a weapon without the opportunity to come out the other side and regain something of himself. As if it was the only answer, as if Steve would have such an answer if that came to it.

 _Bucky_ , Steve thinks, too sadly for someone with his best friend sitting right beside him. He wishes he could whisper this afternoon, this moment, into the ear of that other version of him. He wants to tell him about all of this: about a life where he fixes things with capable hands, where he can put his mind to work, where he had another chance for ball games with his father and got to cry at his funeral, where he sits and eats and laughs with his mother and sisters, their spouses and children, at least once a week. Where he has a woman who walks shoulder to shoulder with him. Where he holds his own child against his heart and will soon hold another. About the warmth of the bricks steps outside this home and new young laughter ringing where theirs once did.

But he can’t speak to that tempered-steel version of his friend, not for a long time. So he turns to the one beside him instead and says, “Thanks for having us. Really.”

And Bucky grins at him with sun-squinted eyes, gives a shrug that means _of course_ , then says, “By the way, Drea tells me that you’re both Orioles fans now, you asshole,” and Steve laughs and is grateful.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Considering I'd tagged this with Steve and Bucky friendship, I figured I'd dip back in to that significant Steve relationship - avec some of that good, good slice of life insert style. A little nervous to post considering the parts of fandom with enduring anger over Steve's perceived abandonment of Bucky, but I guess I'm living on the edge...
> 
> (Anyone who knows me will attest that I live squarely off the edge.)
> 
> I'm going to try my best to keep a weekly posting schedule over the next little bit but I'm not off for vacation for another week plus and I'm pretty flat out until then and then I'll be, you know, vacationing. So just a heads up in case there's no new chapter for a couple of weeks.


	28. 1954-1963

Peggy tells him she’s pregnant on Christmas morning, after they’ve exchanged gifts. He finds himself overcome with giddy laughter all through their breakfast, and has a baby announcement card mocked up before supper. The following February, she miscarries. It happens again that summer, and then midway through the next year: that process of hope, ever more careful now, then despair, swallowed and borne and hidden by each for the other.

Steve knows it’s him. In Peggy’s other future, with her other husband, she had two children. He’d met them. Peggy tells him fiercely that she won’t allow him to feel guilty about it, that he certainly didn’t go into fertility specifics with her elderly self so he might not know everything that he thinks he does. He feels guilty anyway.

“There are other ways to have kids,” Bucky points out around a bite of hot dog as they take in a ballgame. (Steve’s been trying to get to as many Dodgers games as he can. They’ll be moving the team next year.)

Steve takes a bite of his own, pretending to mull over what Bucky has said while already having rejected it in his mind. But it comes back that night as he finishes washing up and starts down the hallway to join Peggy in bed. He passes by the little room that they always keep closed now. They’d been nearly five months along last time. Halfway had seemed a safe enough time to buy the few things now gathering dust: a rocking chair, a blanket, a little stuffed bear.

How would it feel to have a baby lie beneath that blanket, to sit in the rocker and soothe them to sleep? Even if it were a baby that didn’t share blood with him or with Peggy, Steve thinks suddenly that it can’t feel as bad as keeping that room shut forever.

He sits staring at his book, propped up against his pillow. Finally he turns to Peggy, waits until she can tear herself away from her novel to notice.

“What would you say,” he asks carefully, “about adoption?”

She bookmarks her page thoughtfully, staring at him for long, slow moments. Finally she says, “I’ve actually been wondering about it myself.”

* * *

They don’t adopt a baby at all. It becomes obvious pretty early on that the babies are the easiest to place, that this is what most of the other couples are looking for. Instead they are introduced to Rosie, four years old, stubborn and _furious_ in a way that puts both her parents to shame. One look at her clenched fists behind the yard fence at the Sheltering Arms Children’s Home, at the way her hair has been crammed into bristling pigtails for their meeting and how her face is as red as her name, and they know they have to take her home.

That doesn’t mean it’s easy.

They learn quickly to put anything they don’t want broken higher than the reach of a four year old on a chair. Peggy takes her time getting ready in the mornings, knowing that any perceived weakness or retreat will be latched onto, but she breathes a sigh of relief every time she gets to drive away from the house. Steve figures that outings are a no-go just yet after she bites a boy who tries to take her swing at the park hard enough to bring blood. He becomes expert at fitting in bits of housework around the times Rosie exhausts herself and collapses into a nap.

“Giving up now will only make things worse for her later,” Peggy says one night in the dark of their bedroom, and Steve can tell just from her tone that she’s setting her jaw the way he’s familiar with from European battlefields. “It will only teach her that other people are not to be relied upon or trusted, that those who promise to love you will give up.”

She’s right. She’s right, and Steve has to keep reminding himself as he closes all the windows so the neighbors won’t also have to listen to Rosie shrieking unceasingly that she hates him, hates him, _hates him_.

Sometime in 2014, or perhaps 2015, he read an article about how important early childhood education is for development. The question of sending Rosie to kindergarten is not so much a discussion as an accepted impossibility. Steve makes first grade his goal instead. When she pounds her feet on the ground or smacks the walls, he puts pillows beside or beneath her and reminds her not to hurt herself, bandages her fingers if she does. While she shouts, blistering up with rage and curses that he didn’t even know someone could learn that young, he sits quietly beside her with his sketchpad, taking deep breaths in and out until she starts to copy him without realizing. If she throws a tantrum during dinner, she has her food in her room and they ask if there is something to do to make it better for tomorrow. He knocks on her bedroom door and waits before he ever walks in. When he gets the urge to yell, he turns away.

One afternoon she steals his wedding ring while he is washing the lunch dishes and flushes it away before he can get it back from her. He sits on the rim of the bathtub with his face in his hands and for the first time he thinks with a bit of relief about waking up alone in that SHIELD-constructed room, about the realization of the snap: _I have been through worse than this, unrelenting and encompassing and hopeless worse_.

And then he feels her close to him. No hand on his arm or nuzzle against his shoulder, but soft peanut butter breath and a tiny voice saying, “I’m sorry I did that. I want to get it back,” and even if it is too late for some things, it is just the beginning for others.

When Rosie enters her first grade classroom, it is with reminders to count to ten and then to twenty, with a warning that hurting someone else was not acceptable (they’ll get into the nuances of this later), and with a note from her father that says that she should be excused if she feels that she needs to be. When the teacher and then the principal ignore this last, they learn just why it’s a mistake to try that with Grant Carter. (When the principal retires the next year and her replacement is equally dismissive of such indulgent special instructions for a second grader, it becomes quickly and terrifyingly apparent that it’s even more of a mistake to try that with Peggy Carter.)

In third grade, Rosie wins the spelling bee, has a playdate with one of her vast array of friends nearly every week, and leaves the class only twice between September and December. Her teacher describes her as bossy and stubborn and self-righteous and smart as a whip. Bucky reads over her report card while twirling spaghetti around his fork, and reminds Steve with stifled laughter that Mrs. Leary did always say that retribution would be visited upon him for his behavior in her class.

Just before Christmas, as they decorate the tree together, Rose mentions to Peggy, though certainly loudly enough for Steve to hear from the kitchen, that she is the only one of her friends who does not have a brother or sister and that it would probably be a good idea to fix that.

“Hmm,” Peggy says casually, focusing on ensuring that the ornament she’s just hung isn’t too heavy for its branch. “Your father and I will have to think about that,” as if Steve hadn’t suggested something similar only two nights before.

* * *

It will never be entirely clear precisely how old Emma is. Apparently the children’s home had estimated nearly two, but she was left with only a short note with her name and an apology, so no one really knows. It’s speculated that she likely lost her hearing shortly before being left there, probably due to illness, and that her family felt that they couldn’t take care of her after that.

Peggy and Steve made it clear from their first meetings years ago that the sorts of things that might deter other couples - older age, race or ethnic background, “difficult” personality, medical issues, the circumstances of birth - don’t matter to them. And still, even the afternoon Emma is placed in their arms, the adoption caseworker lets them know that they can still change their minds.

“Why on earth,” Peggy asks, rising, Emma's eyes following her with cautious curiosity, “would we want to change our minds?”

She’s a sweet little girl, healthy now and smiling, and Steve is incredibly worried about her. He shows up at the New Jersey School for the Deaf before the adoption is even completely finalized, asking about sign language lessons. (When Howard recounts the story, Steve is always storming in and pounding on the superintendent’s door, but there was actually mostly a lot of showing off Emma in her soft, pretty dress to the school secretary, followed by polite but slightly confused conversation over tea. Generally, hearing parents who arrived looking to speak with the superintendent sought promises about perfect speech and reassurances of future employment, and had no interest in learning to sign themselves even if they were going to allow their children to do so.)

He and Peggy actually buy a second car so he and Emma can drive regularly to the Trenton home of Caroline Linzer, a Deaf former teacher from the school who had left to raise her own children. Mrs. Linzer is warm and funny and reassuring, patient with Steve as she leads him through the alphabet, numbers, basic vocabulary, and then slowly on to conversation with Emma watching all the time. He’s still scared that there might have been too much of a delay between when Emma lost her hearing and when she started learning to sign. He doesn’t know enough about brain development and childhood language acquisition, and neither does probably anyone in this time. He has another of those moments - a surprise each time - of missing the internet with all of its knowledge and answers. He wishes, in a way that he never expected to, that he could open up an email and contact the lead experts in anything, and have them eagerly respond for Captain America.

It seems to be alright, though who knows what might have been otherwise. Their dinner table is soon full of signed chatter, Emma putting together fragments of sentences with her chubby fingers, Peggy’s quickening hands admonishing Rosie for flicking food at her sister even as Rose protests in both sign and sing-song that “she _likes_ it, Mumma!”

“The first legislation about public schools accommodations won’t be passed until the mid-seventies, I think,” Steve tells Peggy as they wash up from dinner while the girls play in the next room. By their guess, Emma isn’t even three yet, but it’s probably already too late to lay groundwork for a change before she’s ready for kindergarten. And would they even want to? The School for the Deaf is bigger and farther away, not the familiar neighborhood grade school where Rosie has been growing up, but would it be better among peers there than to be the only child in class with an interpreter, if they could even find one willing to do the job?

Steve drives Emma over to the nursery at the School for the Deaf himself, every morning. He lays to rest the image of his girls walking to school beside each other, but the reality of Emma running to greet her friends in the schoolyard, grinning and heedless with hands alive before her, is better anyway.

* * *

They have a family meeting about adopting more kids. Well, technically they have one meeting where they agree that maybe adding a brother to the family actually sounds like a good idea, and then they have a second discussion when the caseworker presents them with two files from Boystown; the state will split up siblings if it means making a sure match for one, but will certainly seize on the possibility of placing both in a home together, and how could Steve and Peggy consider taking one of these children without the other?

“Would you make _us_ split up?” Rosie demands fiercely, clutching her sister too tightly, while Emma chants in fluid, furious sign, “Brothers should stay together! Brothers should stay together!” They don’t seem to notice that neither of their parents are actually opposing them.

“That last room can likely fit an extra bureau,” Peggy says, and Steve nods.

“Bunk beds could work.”

Their first worry is that the new additions won’t be able to pick up sign, that they will all end up divided along who in the family can communicate with who. But they watch Emma and Rosie demonstrating with patience the correct way to form letters, the facial expressions that go along with certain words, and they begin worrying instead about their oldest two. Rosie’s big sister authority has been accepted easily until now, but with another oldest sibling now in the house, one closer to her age and with a forceful personality to match hers, things are changing.

“I can’t help but think,” Peggy says, after they’ve broken up a bristling argument over whether it’s possible to cheat at The Game of Life (strangely, the opinion of both sides is _yes_ and that the other one had done it), “that this might be a real piece of luck for Rose, finding another child who doesn’t simply allow her to have her way.”

Steve asks, not really wanting to know the answer, “But will the house be standing when she’s fully learned that lesson?”

They’re still working through that situation when Steve starts noticing something that he can’t help but focus on instead. There must have been signs earlier - dress-up clothes clung to after playtime, people examined with careful, wondering eyes as they passed in the street - but Steve first sees this: it is a Saturday, not quite turned to spring and Nathaniel is getting over one last cold, so Steve has taken the other children to try the new bakery in town, an attempt to leave the house a little quieter for him. The kids are pointing to their favorite pastries, leaving finger-smudges on the display case. Emma blinks a _cookies!_ sort of charm up at her father. One of the bakery employees - an older woman, neat, flour-dusted apron, curled hair tied back - passes them to get back behind the counter.

“What beautiful daughters you have,” she tells Steve, smiling. He glances over, seeing what she does: three small forms still bundled in coats, hair blond, darker, and darkest peeking out from beneath knit hats, all to the chin or longer. Steve is still waiting for warmer weather to take them for spring haircuts.

“We’re two daughters and one son,” Rose corrects the woman, and as she trills, “Oh, my mistake!” before disappearing into the back, Steve watches two children return obliviously to picking treats and one turn away, sudden light suddenly dimmed, arms hugged against skinny chest, staying quiet, quiet, quiet.

The weather gets warmer, and Steve, acting on a hunch, asks who would like to get a haircut instead of simply adding it on the calendar. In the end, he goes to the barber and so does Nathaniel and that is all.

He tries to make himself as approachable as possible, says that he will answer any question, that there is no need to worry. But he wonders if the question has already been asked and harshly answered by someone else - another parent, a teacher - in a different way than Steve would.

One day, during homework time for those who have it, Rose finishes early, and then it is just two of them in the kitchen. Steve is thinking through the grocery list to the soundtrack of small feet swinging in that familiar, beloved, and entirely irritating way.

The question, when it comes, does not sound as expected.

“My first parents used to take us to church before they died.”

“We can go if you want,” Steve offers, mind still partly on the grocery list, partly on the muffins he and Emma have just put into the oven. He and Peggy haven’t really thought much about what to do if this stuff came up, though they probably should have considering the back and forth about what children they should even be allowed to be matched with in the first place based on their “mixed marriage” (Steve was down in the records as Catholic, Peggy as Anglican, which apparently counted as Protestant). But none of the other kids remember their lives with their birth parents much, not even Nathaniel who has someone to remind him, and so it hasn’t seemed much more than intellectual until now.

“No,” he hears back hurriedly, and Steve looks up to see blue eyes pointing themselves down toward the math workbook on the table. The feet have stopped their swinging. Steve goes alert, the muffins forgotten. “I just wanted to know…Do you think that people get made wrong sometimes?”

Steve is likely not really prepared for this conversation. But he supposes that he’s more prepared than he might have been.

He stands and comes over, crouches beside the chair and says carefully, “I think everyone is exactly right the way they are, including you. But if you feel like something is making you confused, you can tell me and I’ll try to help.”

A tiny headshake, nervous, tentative, which is not normal at all. Steve’s heart breaks a little. He tries something else.

“If you could pick any name for yourself, any name at all, what would you pick?”

“I already like Andrew, promise! When we looked up our names in Boy Scouts, the book said it means brave. And it’s the name my first mom and dad gave me.”

“And I’m sure that your first parents would know that if it’s not the right name for you anymore, we can change it. I know they would be happy if you picked a name that you liked better,” Steve fibs.

For a moment, Steve worries that the pencil is going to break in that little fist. Then, the voice, small and trembling and fearless: “Andrea also means brave. I checked.”

Steve smiles. “Yeah, it does.”

* * *

Peggy knows people who are gay or lesbian, “confirmed bachelors,” presumed spinsters. There are Angie’s theater friends and people she met in the war, men and women alike. Their kids call both Josie and Violet “aunt” now. None of that has ever troubled her, nor has countering ignorance or hatred in that area.

Questions of gender are something else. It isn’t something she has encountered much more than anyone else, and the things it implies in this era are almost entirely lurid and wrong. Steve remembers them discussing Christine Jorgensen a few years back when the headlines were everywhere, and how he had tried to explain how things would come to be understood later, at least as he understood them himself.

“What would you have done if this had happened...then?” she asks, waving a vaguely future-ward hand over their late night (technically, early morning) tea. He can’t tell what she thinks just yet.

The idea of Steve having had children in the future is nearly laughable. Tony, then. What would Tony have done if Morgan had come to him and said he’d been wrong about having a daughter, or at least not entirely right? Said, “Gender neutral name, Pepper’s a genius,” probably, and then protected his kid with everything in him.

“For now, we listen,” Steve says. “Later, it might mean finding a doctor, but for now we listen and see and try to make the best choices, the way we would for any of the kids.”

1963 suburban New Jersey is not exactly where and when Steve would have chosen for this, but in another way, this _is_ what he chose, to be with his wife and his children here, as much as he wishes things could be different.

“I like to pretend that when people call me Andy, it’s really Andi, like a girl,” Steve hears one night at bedtime, whispered while Nathaniel is still brushing his teeth.

“You _are_ Andi,” Steve whispers back, tucking the blankets in tighter. “I’m always calling you Andi.”

They have to keep it in whispers for now, and Steve hates that, because Steve has never been able to be quiet about things that are right. But this time it isn’t about him getting his face bloody in an alley in order to stand up, it’s about his _child_ , who has friends and kind teachers and people who smile in passing in the street, and who would lose all of that and maybe more out of ignorance about the truth.

Being at home seems comfortable enough. They haven’t mentioned anything to the other kids yet; Andi says it is okay, that it would be good, but they know that Rosie especially might have a hard time not letting something slip. The ASL that they use as a family doesn’t need pronouns and Emma made a name sign that can just as easily stand for Andi. At school, though, there is a particular expectation of who Andrew Carter should be which would be dangerous to deviate from. Steve sits in uncomfortable silence with the idea that Andi doesn’t seem to even consider asking for anything to be different, with the realization that he wouldn’t be able to grant such a wish, at least not now.

(There is, he and Peggy have realized, likely only one thing to be done.)

It is already close to summer, and they pack up as soon as school is over. Howard thinks nothing of letting them take over the secluded beach house he bought in Maine. (Apparently he “picked it up” a few years ago, an idea that Steve can barely think about in reference to a carton of good ice cream, much less a whole house that its owner has apparently never used.) The kids spend most of the day running in and out of the water or building castles, while their parents lounge on the sand and occasionally call them over to eat or reapply sunscreen, such as it is. (Steve is extremely diligent about this, regardless of how effective this decade’s variety might actually be. None of his kids have his Irish skin, but they don’t have his healing, either, and he tries to help avoid sunburn and skin cancer alike.)

Andi’s dark hair, uncut for months, continues to lengthen; by the middle of July, it is a sort of thick shag and still growing. Peggy brushes it into a ponytail every morning and redoes it as the activity of the day musses it back up.

It is Peggy’s first vacation in a long while, though she leaves them for a few days every other week or so; work and responsibility is still calling and she can’t entirely forget it all. She does stand firm in her promise to avoid thinking about those sorts of problems when she’s with them, and it’s beautiful to see her glowing from the sun, relaxing with a book or loud with laughter as she chases one or another of the children down the beach. The housekeeper Howard sends over once a week agrees to stay for an evening, and Steve takes Peggy dancing. It’s only a visiting trio on stage at the local community center, just this side of the high school dance that Steve never attended, but with them, it’s always more. Among the couples, Peggy leans into his chest, sweet and upright and familiar now. She is more his partner now than he ever dared hope.

During the last week of July, it rains for days in a row, and midafternoon on the third, Steve and Peggy exchange a glance and know that it’s time to break the news to their children.

They talk to Andi first, and Steve, eagle-eyed, sees the rise and fall of those narrow young shoulders, the way they do not brace themselves but relax: a sigh, a _finally, finally._

They find everyone gathered in the great room, cushions dragged into a nest on Howard’s shined, artfully rustic wooden floorboards with the kids settled in a semicircle on top of them. Books and games are scattered around, playing cards hiding at random beneath the pillows; they’re getting down to the last of the indoor entertainments, anxious for the weather to clear and allow them to break back outside. Steve seats himself on the stone ledge by the raised fireplace and Peggy sits beside him.

“We have some things to tell you all,” Steve starts.

“Is this about Mom’s work? Nate says you’ve been doing a lot of secret talking,” Rosie demands, fingers flashing, apparently having appointed herself to speak for the group. Nate has the sharpest eyes, the most acute nose, for these sorts of things, but he does not look troubled, merely curious. He has his bear sitting in his lap, as if Edward is an attentive part of the family meeting as well. “And we all know that a lot of Mom’s work is secrets,” Rose finishes keenly.

(Steve knows that Nate probably didn’t phrase it exactly that way, and not just because Rose puts her own spin on things. He and Peggy have always said that none of their children need to call them Mom or Dad until they are ready. With Emma it was barely a question, barely a thought, but it took Rosie more than a year. It hasn’t been quite that long for Nate, but he apparently still hasn’t quite settled into the idea. He mostly avoids calling them anything, which Steve admittedly prefers to the insults with which Rose once addressed him.)

“It is about my work, a bit,” Peggy says carefully. “Your father and I moved years ago because Uncle Howard and I were starting an office in New Jersey. But part of my job has always been working with our elected officials and my colleagues in Washington - that’s difficult when we don’t live nearby.”

“What Mom does is very important,” adds Steve. “When she needs to go away for meetings - I know it’s hard for all of us. And we decided that it might be easier for us to all be in Washington together.”

“We’re moving?” asks Nate, more clarification than anything.

Rose’s hands echo him explosively. “We’re moving?! What about our friends and our school? What about Nana and the aunts and uncles, everyone? I don’t want to leave our house!”

Emma looks between them all, flighty curls shivering as her head turns. She looks down at her own lap before she adds, “Everything will change if we move.”

“Some things will stay the same,” Peggy says. “You will have school and friends - new school, new friends. Our family, that will still be the same. You’ll still do chores.” That actually teases out a bit of laughter.

“But some things will be different.” Steve moves his gaze to each of them in turn. He catches Andi’s eye last. He leans forward. He’s practiced this; his ASL is still not entirely fluid, and probably won’t ever be, but he wants to be clear. “Here is something that might seem different. When babies are born, we make guesses about what kind of people they will be when they grow up. Some are right and some are wrong. But when we make guesses - we can push people to be different than they want to be. Maybe we think we’re right or maybe we forget to ask how they feel.”

“I don’t understand,” Rose says, flicking the sign beside her shaking head, mouth puckered downward. “Why is this about moving?”

“Because when we move, I am going to be a sister instead of a brother and you should all call me s-h-e. Everybody thought I was a boy and pushed me to be a boy and told me it was not allowed for me to be different but that was wrong - Dad says, and also Mom. Some people might still be mad if they find out, but when we go to Washington, I am going to be a girl named A-n-d-r-e-a .” She spells out the new name; who knows if she will keep her old name sign or take on a new one. Then she adds, shoulders firmly set but not stiff, “Everybody should call me D-r-e-a. I decided.”

Rose has questions. Emma has quieter, more hesitant ones. Peggy and Steve begin trying to answer them as best they can. Nate leans his head onto Drea’s proud shoulder, tucks Edward more tightly against his side, and lets his eyes fall shut.

* * *

The three girls make their feelings about the move apparent: Rose clearly displeased, Emma worried but with some interest, Drea boldly excited. Nate listens to the others but keeps his own counsel about how he feels. So, after days of watching him for clues, Steve simply asks him.

It is a hot morning and they are walking together into town on a few errands: dropping off some library books, picking up more tape for the boxes even now piling up back at the house. Steve waits until they are past the toy store and its many distractions before he asks, “What do you think about us moving someplace new?”

Nate tilts his head. “I don’t know yet. Maybe it will be scary, but I think it will also probably have good parts. That was what happened when Drea and me came to this home.” Steve realizes with a pang that Nate, just turned four, has already lived in three different places. He puts a hand onto Nate’s shoulder and squeezes a little. Nate looks up at him. “But we aren’t there yet, so I don’t know how it will feel.”

“It’s okay to not know,” Steve tells him as they come to the corner and wait for the cars to pass.

Nate responds, “I know that,” and laughs at his own joke. Steve laughs with him, watching that sweet, gleeful face, not caring that he is stopped in the middle of the sidewalk.

“I think it’s our turn, Daddy,” Nate says, taking Steve’s hand so he will notice that the cars are stopped for them. “Daddy, look, it’s our turn to go.”

Steve swallows. He smiles. “Yes, it is,” he says, and keeps ahold of Nate’s hand as they cross the street together.

* * *

The house Peggy found in Maryland could fit their old place in twice and still have room left over. Rosie has maintained an impressive sulk through their return from Maine, all of the packing, their various goodbyes, and the drive down south, but even she drops the attitude to race through the new space and argue about who gets which room.

Steve, unpacking bags from the car, keeps glancing up to take in the bits and pieces of this new place, the things he missed in the pictures that Peggy brought back: the windows, all of them, everywhere, and their shutters; the heavy wooden door which hangs open into the summer air so that he can hear the kids screaming excitedly from room to room; the path and the lush areas of the yard which will be perfect for flowers in beds and borders.

He feels a hand on the small of his back. Peggy, who slides an arm around him and presses her mouth to the side of his neck, holding there for a moment.

“How long do you think we’ll be waiting,” she asks, “until someone comes along offering a pound cake and hoping for some gossip about the new neighbors?”

“Well,” he says, sliding an arm around her waist, “we have trees, probably a mile of driveway, and I think we are officially on the outskirts of town. So I'd say we'll have at least fifteen minutes to ourselves.”

“Sounds lovely,” she says. “Some time to settle in, just the family.”

“Just the family,” he repeats. He could mention that it’s just been the family for the two day drive from Jersey. Instead he glances at her, leans back a little to take in the house beneath the broad blue of the sky, beginning to be filled with the voices of their children, the joy and life and everything that they can bring to this place. He holds her against him. Just them, just all of them here together, here at the heart of things.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, there's The Kids for you.
> 
>   * Most of my info on the adoption process as of the late fifties/early sixties came from the documentary [The Chosen Child](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdvleYqQIb0) (all five parts of which are available on Youtube). It’s also worth noting Nina Bernstein’s [The Lost Children of Wilder: The Epic Struggle to Change Foster Care](https://books.google.com/books?id=D3pNOx1scvcC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false), which contained perhaps the most interesting and bonkers fact that didn’t make it into the chapter: “In [New York City during] the 1930s, the Catholics were given all the foundlings discovered from noon to midnight, the Protestants all those found from midnight to noon.” (The book goes on to say that Jewish agencies and individuals protested, so in the 1950s they made the totally chill and normal change to a round robin three way split instead.)
>   * I couldn’t find 100% confirmation on the early sixties teaching philosophy of the New Jersey School for the Deaf (known since 1965 as the Marie H. Katzenbach School for the Deaf or, snazzily, Katzenbach - New Jersey’s School for the Deaf). There was a whole [early/mid 20th century controversy](https://books.google.com/books?id=yIb7XvGDh3YC&pg=PA89&dq=new+jersey+school+for+the+deaf+clergy&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiKg_2GjbjmAhUSVN8KHb7cAtYQ6AEwAnoECAYQAg#v=onepage&q=new%20jersey%20school%20for%20the%20deaf%20clergy&f=false) about teachers being forced not to use ASL while clergy serving the school was trained in it, and [in the twenties](https://books.google.com/books?id=9K2v4ieEsacC&pg=PA172&lpg=PA172&dq=New+Jersey+School+for+the+Deaf+oralism&source=bl&ots=msAPGbXprj&sig=ACfU3U35ZDjJ6tNF_kVLzWheXukZz8aWag&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwij2duPi7jmAhWqd98KHboIA_EQ6AEwA3oECBAQAQ#v=onepage&q=New%20Jersey%20School%20for%20the%20Deaf%20oralism&f=false), the superintendent fired a bunch of Deaf staff and shut down the acclaimed school newspaper when they opposed oralist policy, which was a Big Deal. But a bunch of representatives from the school were at the [1963 Convention of American Instructors of the Deaf](https://books.google.com/books?id=ZzGJDK91drIC&pg=PA1226&dq=New+Jersey+School+for+the+Deaf&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi447XIobfmAhWvwVkKHbrqBBYQ6AEwAHoECAMQAg) which affirmed that “the practice of oralism is deadening and defeating when it takes away from the deaf the freedom of their own natural language,“ and talked about the inaccuracy of lipreading, but then the people there also got really into this Rochester Method of communication that was basically oralism plus fingerspelling, so there’s that. Weirdly, my source regarding the establishment of a nursery school there sometime between 1940 and 1975 is [this disclosed CIA document](https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP80-00706A000200020001-2.pdf).
>   * Much appreciation to Genny Beemyn, both for writing [this resource on Transgender History in the United States](https://www.umass.edu/stonewall/sites/default/files/Infoforandabout/transpeople/genny_beemyn_transgender_history_in_the_united_states.pdf), and also for making it available online. Some other resources which I read recreationally and didn’t actively use but certainly were in my mind as I was writing this include _It Feels Good to Be Yourself: A Book About Gender Identity_ by Theresa Thorn, illustrated by Noah Grigni, and _Gender Queer_ by Maia Kobabe.
>   * I started this chapter back around May and - I’ll be honest - didn’t keep track of my sources or resources super well at the time. Some I’ve been able to track back/track down (all of the names of children's homes mentioned here were real according to Ancestry forum searches and period directories, for example), but others, like the real estate listing that I used as a reference for the Maryland house, seem lost to me. In apology for my incomplete sourcing, feel free to obsess with me over [this website](https://www.oldhousedreams.com/) devoted to older houses, both all the wonderful images and its hilarious and delightful comments section. 
> 



	29. 1972

They had planned to spend Christmas up in Brooklyn, but two weeks beforehand, Bucky calls and ruefully announces that the chickenpox have gotten ahold of his kids. Steve knows that there’s nothing to be done - Steve has had them, obviously, as has Peggy, but they’re the only Carters who have that they know of, and it’s particularly important that Drea not get sick - but he still lets himself groan along with the kids when he tells them at dinner that night.

“You know,” Peggy says, brushing out her hair in front of her vanity that night, once she’s gotten home from her late meeting, “Howard mentioned that he’s giving Jarvis the week off - his first vacation in years.”

“Where are they going?” Steve asks, sitting on the edge of the bed to strip off one sock and then the other.

“He promised Ana that he would take her to some exciting ski resort.” Steve snorts, and Peggy smiles at him in the mirror and adds, “Well, I’m certain that for Mr. Jarvis, it will be closer to an exciting book in front of a fireplace. Perhaps an extreme cup of tea if he’s feeling adventurous. But regardless, it means that Howard and Maria are alone for the holiday as well. We might ask if they would like for us to host them.”

Steve calls Maria the next day and asks if the Starks would join them for the holiday.

“Oh, you know how it is with the baby,” Maria says. “I don’t know how well he would put up with the trip. Why don’t you come here? I can take care of everything.”

He tries to imagine her doing all that cooking with Tony on her hip or whining from his seat - he has no confidence at all in Howard’s helpfulness - and tries tactfully suggesting that the Stark home could be the site of the festivities with all the preparations left up to him. But Maria’s hostess sensibilities simply cannot allow for a guest to take care of things that way…

It takes a bit more wrestling back and forth before they agree that they will all travel to the Stark’s home in Maine, and Steve and Maria will do the cooking together.

(“Now we’ll both be a little inconvenienced and probably step on each other’s toes, but I guess it’s a compromise,” Steve tells Peggy the next morning.)

Christmas Day is on a Tuesday this year, and the Carters leave on Saturday afternoon, sleeping over for the night in Connecticut and pulling up to the house just before noon on Sunday. The kids know the routine and join their parents in unpacking the car; several trips ferrying suitcases and the boxes of supplies that Steve had brought, and they’re done and ringing the doorbell.

Howard and Maria step out onto the porch, Tony forced to hold one of each of their hands because of the wind and the icy steps (he keeps straining away from them and pouting when he can’t seem to best their strength). There is a flurry of greetings before the kids slip through the doorway to choose bedrooms and set up games, somehow stealing Tony from under his parents’ noses and swooping him inside with them as well.

(Steve has the feeling that Em is going to regret thinking he is going to be a discreet and amenable accessory.)

There are plenty of trees on the property, and Howard, who had offered to pay someone to cut one down, leaves his wife behind serving drinks to Peggy and reluctantly bundles up and shows Steve to the caretaker’s shed where they find a saw and round tape measure. That evening, they all have hot chocolate while trimming the tree with a combination of decorations brought from the Carters’ home and the Starks’. If Howard is proprietary about the tree, primping its branches, making sure the ornaments are properly balanced so it can look its best, commenting every so often about how he’d spotted it behind a larger, showier one and knew it was the perfect candidate, Steve only lifts an amused eyebrow to Peggy and says nothing.

Later, he is in the kitchen, taking advantage of Maria having gone to take Tony to bed by putting away the supper leftovers that she had told him she would take care of. In the hall, the phone rings. The kids have the TV up, watching _Mary Tyler Moore_ , and he barely registers it until his wife joins him in the kitchen. Without a word, she begins covering dishes, arranging the refrigerator, judging whether the last dinner roll is worth saving on its own.

“Who was that calling?” Steve asks after several minutes of quiet. There’s an edge to this particular silence of hers, a feeling of suspended breath.

Peggy stands with the refrigerator door open, scanning over the shelves. “Mrs. Truman,” she says finally, closing the door. “Her husband wants to see Howard and myself."

“He doesn’t have long?” Steve leans against the counter. The newspapers and broadcasters have been reporting each turn of President Truman’s declining health over the past weeks.

“He was apparently barely awake long enough to ask for us. I expect—” Her mouth pulls inward. "I expect he will try to request our reassurance about the bomb again.” Peggy’s tone does not speak to any futility she might see in obeying such a summons, especially at this particular time, when the man in question might not be aware enough to receive them, might not even be alive when they arrive. It is as if she is already preparing herself for the visit, even here with him, setting on a mask. But then she steps toward him, taking advantage of his open arms and pressing herself against his chest. “I’ll tell the children,” she says, muffled against his neck as he moves automatically to hold her. “I know they’ll be disappointed.”

“We’ll do it together.”

* * *

Their kids are old enough to handle their mother potentially missing Christmas with a decent amount of grace - even Nate is thirteen, though he would likely have accepted the news with equanimity even before - and Tony is too young to really understand what is happening and too accustomed to his father’s travel besides. Still, there is an air of slightly forced cheer replacing the natural cousin of past holidays. As dusk falls on Christmas Eve, Emma bakes several trays of gingerbread cookies, the scent filling the house warmly. Rosie lights the fireplace and suggests/pressures them into singing carols; Maria has a lovely voice and somehow manages to hit some fairly impressive notes even as she must redirect a scrabbling Tony away from the flames. Steve grins at her, one parent to another.

He had revived his old skill and crocheted the stockings for each of his children, along with ones for himself and Peggy, and though he’s offered to make new ones over the years, the most they have ever agreed to is repairs as necessary. The last thing they do before the kids head to bed is hang them over the now-cooling fireplace. The Stark stockings are far more elaborate than his simple ones, but he feels a little sad seeing Maria hanging them herself, Tony having exhausted himself several hours ago.

She sits looking at them with an afghan draped over her lap, head tipped gently to one side, while he mixes a martini and gets her one of Emma’s cookies. (He would have poured some eggnog, but he doesn’t know her feelings on it.)

“Are you alright?” he asks softly once he’s settled on the couch next to her. This might be the first time they have been alone together. He likes Maria and considers her a friend, but they have rarely had occasion to talk just the two of them, without Howard or Peggy or both. He isn’t even sure that he’s correctly reading the sadness in her expression.

She breaks off a piece of gingerbread (the point of a star: Steve didn’t bring cookie cutters, so Em did the best she could with a knife; it’s resulted in some slightly lopsided but tasty shapes) and bites into it.

After a moment, she says slowly, “I know that marriage is hard, every marriage is in its own way. But sometimes being married to Howard...It’s different, and lonelier than I thought it would be.” She breaks off another point, but sits looking at it rather than eating it. “Sometimes I don’t know what he was imagining in a wife, and I don’t know that he does either. It’s hard to build a family, a life, a home, all the traditions that come with it, when it seems you’re doing it by yourself. Not that Jarvis and Ana aren’t darling, the most wonderful, and I’m so grateful for them but—I married Howard, not the Jarvises, and he’s so busy all of the time, rarely shares his work with me. I know what he does is important, but it would be—I would—I wish things would just stop, so I could have my husband for a while. I wish he would make the time, even when things haven’t stopped.”

Setting the cookie down, she meets Steve’s eye and takes a hasty sip of her drink. “You and Peggy must have had some of the same problems, though. I know that she’s different from Howard, but the things she can’t tell you, the times when she works late or has to travel and leave you alone with the kids…”

“It is hard,” he says gently, and she lets out a breath of relief, as if she feared he would say that he’s never been bothered, it’s only her. “It’s hard knowing that something urgent can call her away when the kids need her - and maybe it’s selfish, but sometimes I need her too and she can’t be there. It’s hard being the one at home, knowing that the work can be dangerous, feeling as if no story about a dry-cleaning mixup or a good sale on cereal can match up with what she deals with every day. Going back to school, finding friends and hobbies of my own, that’s helped. We’ve also been at this a long time. We’ve learned to talk about the way we feel and, as much as we can, about the work. Sometimes there isn’t anything she’s able to say, and all I can do is make her a cup of tea or settle an argument between the kids so she doesn’t have to do it. But she always knows that I’m there to listen if she needs it.”

Maria nods, looking down at the blanket on her lap. She picks a little at the stitching before seeming to catch herself and smooth it back. “You’re right,” she says, a little overly bright. “I’m glad I’m not the only one. And it’s probably different because Peggy is Peggy and not Howard, and she’s not married to me, she’s married to Captain America.”

Steve’s instinct is, strangely, to freeze, as if he might sit still enough to rewind time. When he gathers himself, seconds that feel like an eternity later, he says, very carefully, “I hadn’t realized that Howard told you.”

“Told me?” She finally pops the little piece of gingerbread into her mouth, chewing a little puzzledly. “Oh, that you’re Captain America? Well, Howard didn’t need to tell me that. I knew that he did a lot of top-secret work during the war, it’s what brought him to SHIELD now, and you knew him and Peggy from back then. The two of them never call you Grant, only Steve, just like Bucky and his family, and that crew who attended our wedding - the Howling Commandos, even if no one introduced them that way. I didn’t realize it was meant to be a real secret.”

“You’re a smart woman,” is all Steve can manage, torn between the urge to review the last twenty years for any others who might have caught on, and the urge to laugh because despite the apparently shoddy cover story and his proximity to the US intelligence apparatus, Maria is probably the only one who ever has.

“I know I am,” she says simply. From what Steve’s been told over the past few years, she had graduated top of her high school class and gone right out to work - perfume counter jobs, secretarial work, bank teller. The academic scholarships she’d earned, in and out of state, hadn’t made a difference when there were still room and board and fees to be covered, and parents and three younger siblings to support besides. “But apparently not smart enough for my husband to want to share much of anything with me, even the identity of one of his best friends, who happens to be my son’s godfather.”

He’s still a little overwhelmed by the idea that she even knows who she is - that she has for nearly this whole time, that she just figured it out on her own and it didn’t seem to matter to her - but he knows that it’s less important right now. He rests his hand atop hers. “It has nothing to do with how smart you are, or how trustworthy. With this, and of his work, Howard—He’s my friend, and I know that he loves you, but I also know how he gets caught up in things. Doesn’t always remember the value of what he has, and it shouldn’t have to be your job to constantly remind him. So if you put your foot down, if you put in the effort, and he doesn’t really change, I hope you know that whatever decision you make for yourself, and for Tony, I’ll support you. And I think I can speak for Peggy when I say she’ll support you too.” He smiles. “If anyone can sympathize with having to deal with Howard….” She smiles back, though it is bent at the corners.

“I think,” she tells him, “that nearly anyone else would have said that there was no decision to make, that it was simply my lot to stand by him, for our child or whatever status our marriage grants me, or because that is a wife’s duty. Even with all the change in the last decade, all the lectures I’ve gone to, the legislation I supported, the women who I know do things differently, it sometimes seems as if that’s only for other people - stronger women, or more exceptional ones.”

“I’d say that you’re a strong woman, and an exceptional one,” Steve says in return. “But you shouldn’t need to be. All the changes being made are important, of course they are, they’re necessary, but you don’t need to think about it as setting an example or being an inspiration for others. You can just be a person making the right choice for herself.”

She takes down the last of her drink, the remains of the ice chips tinkling in the bottom of the glass as she gestures to the mantle. “Good advice, handy with a needle - those stockings you made are darling, I saw how much the children adore them - and you say you cook too,” she jokes. “Peggy’s lucky to have you.”

And although he knows that she’s trying to change the tone of things, he shakes his head. “I’m luckier to have her. And you deserve to have the same, whether it’s Howard or someone else or no one.” She looks past him and her breath catches, but finally she meets his eyes and nods.

“And I don’t say I cook, I’ve proved it more than once,” he says, teasing now, allowing things to move forward. “But we might want to head to bed ourselves if we want to be awake enough to pull off the menu for tomorrow.”

They tidy up a bit, making sure the fire has entirely burned itself out before they walk down the hall together. As Steve goes to turn the knob on the guest bedroom where he and Peggy are staying, Maria puts a hand on his wrist to stop him.

“It’s hard finding someone who understands,” she says, coming up to kiss his cheek. “Thank you, Steve, for listening.”

How strange to hear her say his name. It’s been such a long time since someone new called him by it. He smiles. “Any time. Really.”

* * *

The next morning, as the kids are unwrapping presents and Tony is collecting the wrapping paper to hoard, Maria looks to see what’s been added to her stocking in the night. Along with a small box of chocolates, there are three crocheted stockings, a little hastily made and clearly with some yarn remainders patched in where certain colors have run out, but in corresponding plaids with names stitched at the top. The note inside reads, _Always time to start new traditions if you want to._

* * *

Steve is bent over the open oven with a meat thermometer, listening with one ear to Tony who is ignoring his new Fisher-Price farm set and play telephone in favor of crumpling, uncrumpling, and tearing up his wrapping paper stash, when he hears footsteps entering the kitchen behind him; probably Maria coming back from showing the kids where the plates are.

“Do you want to take care of dessert, or getting the Brussels sprouts ready to roast?” he asks.

“I hope you didn’t think I’d learned to bake in just a day.”

He closes the oven and puts the thermometer on the counter before turning to see his wife standing, arms crossed, in the doorway.

“Hey,” he says, the smile coming to his face without thought at all. His chest is filled suddenly with a tenderness. He hadn’t even fully realized how much he missed her until he has her back here with him.

She steps forward and he does the same, meeting her in the middle of the kitchen tile. Her kiss is brief and sweet, so sweet, against his mouth.

“Do you want to talk?” he asks softly, knowing without having to be told that she’s come back troubled, and her head barely considers a nod. “Well, I have a lot to tell you,” he murmurs into her hair, and she steps back to look at him, seeing something in his face that makes her nod and put a hand to his cheek.

“Later tonight, we’ll talk,” she says, as good as a promise. And he feels lucky, so lucky, not just at everyone together for the holiday, the warm smells of food around them, his family laughing in the next room, but because he is able to have this woman by his side, all of their yesterdays and today and the tomorrows too. He turns his head just so, and touches a kiss to her palm, and hears her breath catch for just that second.

“I’ll—I’ll cut the sprouts, shall I?” she says, indicating the knife and cutting board on the counter. He nods, pressing one last kiss to her hair before she moves to rinse her hands and roll up her sleeves. “What exactly are you looking at?” she asks, concentrating on the vegetables, when he still hasn’t moved a minute later, still watching her.

“Merry Christmas, Peg,” is all he says. She smiles over at him before saying mock severely, “Not if there isn’t cake, it won’t be,” and he laughs and goes to gather ingredients. He’ll make her favorite, but he knows that it will be a good day either way. With their kids all safe and healthy and her back with them again, it already is.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hoped to have this up last week in time for what one of my brothers used to call Squismas, but didn't quite make it. Oh well, enjoy it slightly belated anyway?
> 
> (President Truman really did get very ill in late November 1972 and died the day after Christmas. Although he was comatose before he passed and he was publicly committed to the decision to drop both atomic bombs on Japan - and even in private was fairly racist/condescending about his doubts - I did wonder if there might have been enough remaining uncertainty for him to want to talk to people like Howard and Peggy in his last days.)
> 
> (Also, it became significantly important to me for reasons I can't quite remember to have a _Mary Tyler Moore_ reference in here. Literally no idea why, I've never seen the show, but the original outline for this chapter had a lot more stuff about it included. Anyway, in case you care as much as I apparently do, the episode that aired on December 23, 1972 was _The Courtship of Mary's Father's Daughter_.)


	30. 1955

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Heads up for discussion of racial violence, and also polio.
> 
> I got a little...opaque with the historical stuff in this one, so if you want to be prepped going in with an understanding of the Emmett Till case or the Cutter incident particularly, maybe pull up wikipedia or read the endnote first?

Peggy comes home from work and finds her husband crying at the kitchen table.

The newspaper is open in front of him. The countertops are in more of a state of disorder than Steve usually leaves them. She finds herself stepping quietly, the way she would at a crime scene.

“Steve?” She waits, making sure he has heard her, before she touches his shoulder. He still startles a little.

“Peggy. Hi.” It lacks the joy that he sometimes still has at greeting her or even the typical tenderness; the words come flatly from him instead, as if he isn’t entirely registering saying them. Only as he wipes his eyes with the sides of his hands does he seem to actually pull himself into the moment. He shoves his chair back. “Peggy. _Shit_. You’re home.” She typically gets a little twitch of pleasure hearing him curse, a reminder that they are beyond the surface politeness he feels is correct for strangers or acquaintances, but today it only registers for her as properly panicked. He shifts his gaze quickly toward the counter, where a pan of fish and vegetables sits neatly prepared beside a cutting board that still has a pile of peelings on it, half a lemon sitting beside a knife.

“It’s alright, I’m early, no need to get up.” She moves to put the food in herself, noting the time on her watch as she does. Since he started learning to cook, Steve has always been very precise about the practice, spooning flour into measuring cups instead of scooping it and making sure the oven is fully up to the proper temperature before placing anything inside. That he says nothing as she slides the tray inside means either she isn’t making a mess of things, or he hasn’t entirely realized what she is doing. “I had those meetings in the city, which took longer than anticipated, of course, and by the time I was on my way back, it seemed a waste to go back to my office for only a short while before coming home.” She does not mention that she is barely early at all, only fifteen minutes before her expected arrival, and he does not seem to notice, which is odd in itself.

She’s seen him cry before, happy tears at their wedding and as they fell asleep beside each other the night after she told him she was pregnant, hard or sadder ones after Bucky’s fall, at George Barnes’s funeral last year, quietly where she couldn’t see after she was no longer pregnant anymore (and then second time, too). But she was expecting it then, or at least expecting some sort of reaction; now, after all this time, after all that’s happened, seeing him weeping is something of a surprise. He was actually his usual self before she left this morning, joking as he handed her the marmalade, kissing her lightly at the door, and she has returned to find him like this.

Seating herself behind him, she places a hand on his forearm atop the table. “Will you tell me what’s happened?” He’s barely opened his mouth to protest when she fixes him with a look. “Clearly something has, and it _is_ important, and I _should_ know.” She rubs her thumb over his broad wrist. Her nails are dark blue today, matching her suit, and against the cuff of his gray shirt, they remind her of tears or rain or the sea. “You’re crying, Steve.”

He pushes out a chuckle, one note, watery and worn. “I guess I am.” The newspaper, as he shifts it toward her, has the grayed look and blurry-edged letters of one handled too long. “I was waiting for the oven to heat up, so I sat down to read the paper and I ran across this.” He points to a tiny item on page four of the Times, barely two inches high, from the AP wire. _Greek Explosion Kills Six_ , reads the headline.

“That’s quite sad,” Peggy offers gently, after she’s skimmed the details (an explosives factory in Serres, six deaths, nearly a hundred injuries, significant property damage).

“Yeah, it is,” says Steve. “But the point is that I didn’t know about it. It would have been the easiest thing in the world to have an inspector come in, to have extra precautions in place, _something_ so that six people wouldn’t be dead.” He stares down at the tabletop, not angry as she might have expected, but something closer to ashamed.

She says, with just the barest hint of admonishment, “Darling, there will always be things that you cannot fix; sometimes you will not know about them or they will be too complex or impossible to alter. And you certainly can’t expect yourself to have memorized the entirety of the New York Times archive.”

“But I’m the only one who could have.” The edge of the paper crumples beneath his spasming fist. Steve has always - nearly as long as she has known him - been very conscious, very careful, of his strength, eventually automatically so. She has never worried about his touch on any part of her in the heat of passion, never thought twice about his superpowered hands taking eggs from the Frigidaire or picking apples in the autumn, stacking and washing and putting away their delicate gilt-edged wedding china.

It strikes her, then, how much worse it is than she thought.

“You are in a unique position, yes,” she tells him, still calm, selecting her words mindfully. “And you have done with it the best you could, the best which could be expected.”

“No, I haven’t.”

“Steve—”

“I haven’t!” He stands, hands shoved into his pockets. “We saw that this spring.” His voice lowers. “And last month too.”

* * *

“If you have advance warning of a murder, you have an obligation to do something about it,” Steve said, and he meant it. Especially a violent, horrible murder, especially a child’s murder, even one that had enormous and international ripples. It was not this boy’s job, Steve said, to teach people lessons about right and wrong that they should have known anyway, that they would learn someday regardless if they were ever going to be willing to learn them.

Things went perfectly: older cousins had, through an untraceable chain of acquaintances, been offered good summer jobs in Chicago and therefore had no reason to encourage excitement or incite jealousy about a family trip down south. A large but anonymous donation which no one ever bothers tracing back to Howard Stark guaranteed that this year’s Nebraska State Fair would be one to remember, offering further incentive to travel there in addition to the opportunity for driving lessons. Emmett Till joined his mother on her trip to Omaha, and no one except those who loved him had reason to remember his name. Steve and Peggy gave a donation of their own, large and even more anonymous, to the NAACP.

As September opened without any mention in the headlines, Steve slept soundly for the first time in months. He did not dream of blood or of those weeks when Peggy’s eyes were shuttered even to him. He did not play over and over behind his eyelids that April day when he, still leaning into the reassurance of the successful polio vaccine testing and its broad public release, had opened his paper, read the name Cutter in a small type headline, and felt a freeze go through him from crown to feet because he had forgotten this part of the history, forgot until he was reminded, forgot until it was too late.

Finally, with Emmett Till safe, he breathed fully for the first time in months, as if he had reached a plateau rather than forcing himself further on an endless climb.

Peggy felt the change in him with relief. She had never expected Steve to be heroic or endlessly inspirational with her, had liked that even when she was still merely Agent Carter to him there was already a trust there; he had confided in her even then, not afraid of seeming weak, not afraid that she would doubt him because she had heard his fears. The way he had taken all of this so very personally had been worrisome, but even more than that, the way he did not talk to her about it hurt.

At the beginning, just after she had lost the first pregnancy, she had been somewhat relieved by it, that he not burdened her with his pain when she was still reeling from her own grief, the surprise of it, its power. Only later did she realize how much she had come to rely on the openness between them but that she did not know how to ask for it - she had never needed to before.

Then the second hit came, the Cutter incident, and it pulled him only further into himself. She knew that it kept him up at night, knew that he was reading obsessively about the new safety measures being put in place and the talk of lawsuits, knew that he had sent out dozens of small payments of his own to the families affected, that he was becoming more and more focused on making sure Emmett Till would stay alive - but she did not know any of this because he told her.

She always knew that he would be there for her when she needed it, but her worry was little about that at all. As time went on and he continued to keep some part of himself from her, she began to wonder if she would ever again see her husband as she had known him. But then he began to appear again, Steve with his true and gentle smiles, his ease with the neighbors, his sharp-eyed consideration, the opinions that he stuck to and those he would debate on late evenings: her Steve, easing himself from beneath the guilt back into being.

They went away together in the summer, convinced each other into trying unfamiliar seafood dishes, laughed at the ridiculously broad-brimmed hat Peggy had brought to shade herself from the sun. His hand pressed itself against the still-warm skin of her back as they laid down to sleep and she relished the feeling. When she lost the second pregnancy the next month, he hid his tears again but did not fade from her the way he had before.

And then October began, and new headlines came: a series of attacks by two white policemen in Alabama, shooting into one house, sending threatening notes, setting fire to another house, all because people were beginning to sign petitions supporting desegregation of the schools and the local dairy. A next door neighbor had sustained a bullet graze when the shots went astray at the first house. The second home had burned quickly and terribly and entirely. The parents who had signed the petition had not even been home. Firefighters later found the children - fourteen, eight, and five - trapped together on the staircase.

Statements by witnesses said the two officers had only stood by and watched, laughing, getting into their patrol car to drive away as the firetruck’s sirens came to the corner. Despite the bravery of those witnesses taking the stand, pointing to the two men sitting with lax, slouching posture at the defendants' table as rows of uniformed officers sat behind them, despite the momentary hope as the grand jury indicted the pair, despite the photos of those three children on every front page in the country, the jury deliberated not even two hours before acquitting.

Her Steve went away again. Oh, he was still there in some ways, lending his artist’s hand to placards and his height and voice to protest marches, taking on more commissions in order to simply turn around and donate the money, sitting up late to talk with her about the recommendations she should make now and to plan with her for the future. But so much of what she loved seemed hidden by time or distance, some fog of life, something essential to Steve slipping away from him and from her as well.

The last week or so had been a bit better. They had gone to a film. Steve consulted her on what tactics to take to make Winifred consent to letting him contribute more than a single pie to their Thanksgiving dinner. Peggy had begun to relax, tentatively, into hope.

And now there was this.

* * *

“I should hope that you weren’t expecting to be able to control everything,” she says, and is surprised to find her tone not only firm but snappish. She is not yelling, not yet, but she isn't quite restricting herself to that controlled admonishment that she does so well.

Steve picks up on it right away; his spine snaps straight. "Of course not," he says, near-controlled right back. He walks to the counter and begins clearing it, movements overly sharp as he brings out the trash bin and scrapes the cutting board into it. "But I'm not talking about things that are out of my control, I'm talking about making mistakes." He finishes with the garbage and pushes the bin back with his foot, picks up a rag to wipe the counter.

With a coldness she does not know she has ever used with him, she asks, "And what mistakes would those be?"

"Peggy—" He is all tiredness suddenly, her knife-edge politeness cutting at him. She can see the slump to his shoulders, the way he rests his weight on his arms as if he can't quite hold himself upright anymore. His fingers squeeze tightly around the rag still in his fist. "I tried to make a difference and it didn’t help. I tried to do something right so a family wouldn't know the pain of losing their child, and three children were lost."

"You act as if one action had direct consequences on the other. Do you believe that without the Till case, these officers were somehow emboldened to do what they did? For all you know, the Selma murders occurred in the other world and were overshadowed by the murder you prevented."

"But that's just it." The rag drops to the counter as he turns to face her. His arms are spread outward rather than crossing themselves over his chest as she might have expected. His face splays open as well, and even as her heart turns at the pain there, she welcomes the sight of it, too, the openness here in front of her. "I don't know enough to know. I should have prepared more, should have remembered more." He shuts his eyes tightly and then opens them again, waiting to face her judgment. "There are thousands of kids who got sick because I didn't pay enough attention. Some of them died because I didn't remember well enough. There are all sorts of other people who I can't help at all - can’t get people to accept that it’s rape even if it’s the husband doing it, can’t convince GIs it’s okay to get themselves help if the war still keeps them up at night, the lead and tobacco and asbestos people putting up ten thousand obstacles to regulation, greasing palms, while people are dying right now, not to mention it’s impossible to even fucking _touch_ anything to do with the Church—"

"You cannot fix everything. You will never be able to. But there are others who will live better lives, who are alive or will be alive because of what you did remember, what you've done, what you've helped me to do." She pushes her chair back and stands slowly, coming toward him still speaking. "What you've done, you have never done alone. I've been right beside you making the choices, most often giving the orders, in fact."

He protests, because although he sees her clearly, he always loves her, "But this isn't about the choices we’ve made, it's about my mistakes," and she cuts him off. She is right in front of him now, close as an embrace, but he does not offer it to her or to himself.

"You are a human being and you are allowed to make mistakes." She touches his jaw, his temple - light, fingertip touches that he still seems to shy from. She looks into his eyes. "We have more important roles than most people, and it makes our mistakes larger, more consequential. But if we blame ourselves so harshly for making mistakes, we will stop doing anything, we will lock ourselves away and refuse to make choices in the event that we make the wrong ones - or we make the right ones, and things go wrong anyway. I trust you to be my partner in this, I always have, because I know the heart of you." She swallows and finds that her voice has gone shallow. "I miss you, Steve. The world doesn't know it, but if you can't get past this, it will miss you too."

"It's just—" and his voice shakes. He does not say that it is all harder than expected, that he isn’t certain he is up to the challenge. Instead, words nearly breaking, he tells her, "This has just been a really shitty year, you know."

She laughs, though it is frail and does not sound like her usual laughter. "It truly has been. And we might have more like it before we're through. But the only way I can see walking through them is with you by my side. And when we have victories and good moments, I need you by my side for those too."

"Are you sure that after all of this—"

"Yes."

"—that you even want me—"

" _Yes_ ," and she puts her palm over his heart.

"I really put you through it, though," he says. He wraps careful fingers against her wrist but does not pull her hand away, only rests them there. "I know that you didn't sign up for—"

"A husband who is the most human person I know, even if he's a bit more than that? A man who has such a sense of responsibility, such tremendous nobility, that he will torture himself over each error and every decision?" She comes somehow closer. Her face is against his neck. "I knew exactly who I was marrying."

She kisses his throat softly, then moves away, wiping swiftly at her eyes. She checks the time on her watch and takes the pan from the oven.

"This will keep," she says, not a question but closer to an order. She isn’t even certain it’s true; they might end up eating beans on toast for supper - which she will prepare, thank you - and leaving the fish out for one of the neighborhood strays. "I think we should take a bath together before we eat."

"You do?" he asks dubiously. She is already unpinning her hair and walking toward the stairs, trusting that he will follow.

"I do. You see, I'm not entirely certain that you have truly absorbed the message that you are allowed to be human with all that entails. I think I can be further instructive in that area, if you'll only go run the water, please."

“You’re pretty stubborn, you know.”

“Yes.” She glances at him over her shoulder, fingers moving toward her jacket buttons. “It’s one of the reasons you married me. Now come along upstairs and we can review some of the others.”

* * *

Their bathtub is larger than most, but Steve is tall and broad and Peggy is no dainty flower herself. Still, they curl themselves somehow into the steaming water together. She settles herself back against his chest, skin on skin, and he rests his cheek on her hair.

“Thank you,” he says into the humid silence of the bathroom. “For before. I—”

“It’s alright.” She picks up one of his damp hands and kisses the back, securing their fingers together. “You know all of that, anyway. You just needed a reminder.”

“Thank you for being my reminder.”

“If you’ll only talk to me—”

“I will—”

“—then I always will be.”

“Always?” he asks, and the ache in his voice matches the one beneath her ribs. She does not speak for a moment.

“For a good long while yet,” she says firmly, once she can, and they both have to be satisfied with that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, happy 2020, I guess.
> 
> (Em dashes getting a workout in this one, huh? And I finally earned my T rating for cursing.)
> 
> Historical notes:
> 
>   * [Emmett Till](https://www.biography.com/crime-figure/emmett-till) was a 14-year-old from Chicago who was kidnapped and lynched in Mississippi in August 1955. The brutality of his killing and his mother’s choice to have open casket viewings as well as photographs of his body, and the subsequent rapid acquittal of his murderers by an all white jury ([deliberation lasted 67 minutes](http://pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/emmett-trial-jw-milam-and-roy-bryant/)) brought significant attention to the continued racism and brutal violence specifically of the southern U.S., and gave further support to the growing Civil Rights movement and to organizations such as the NAACP.
>   * The Cutter incident - following trial testing during 1953-54, Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine was approved for general distribution in April 1955. Cutter Labs was one of the companies given a license to produce the vaccine. Some of the early doses contained the live polio virus (and, times being what they are, I want to emphasize that this was a mistake on the part of those preparing the vaccine, NOT an issue with the vaccine itself). Over 50 children vaccinated with those doses developed polio as a result, and five of those children died. The government acted quickly and within two days of the discovery of the first case Cutter withdrew its vaccine. More about the incident in David Oshinsky’s comprehensive _Polio: An American Story_ , Paul Offit’s _The Cutter Incident_ , or in contemporaneous articles such as: 
>     * _Banned Vaccine Is Hunted In City: Half of the 2,100 Packages Sent …_ New York Times (1923-Current file); Apr 28, 1955; ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The New York Times pg. 33
>     * _Statement by Cutter: Special to The New York Times_. New York Times (1923-Current file); Apr 28, 1955; ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The New York Times pg. 33
>   * The article that sets Steve off at the beginning is real: _Greek Explosion Kills Six_. New York Times (1923-Current file); Nov 3, 1955; ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The New York Times pg. 4
>   * I based the incident in Selma off of real reports from September and October 1955 of two officers of the Selma Police Department being suspended and investigated for kidnapping and arson (although there was both shooting and threats involved in the case too). You can read more in the [Jackson Advocate’s account](https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn79000083/1955-10-29/ed-1/seq-1/) from that time. (Big ups this week go to the Library of Congress’s Chronicling America newspaper digitization project.)
> 

> 
> Some different things that went into writing this chapter:
> 
>   * Steve’s statement to Wanda in Civil War: “This job...we try to save as many people as we can. Sometimes that doesn't mean everybody. But if we can't find a way to live with that, next time... maybe nobody gets saved.” For someone as upstanding as Steve, those choices, and the need to make them over and over, the inevitability of tragedies, must wear quite a bit.
>   * That perpetual post-Endgame _but the past was Bad and Steve would never want to live there_. A lot of this fic has been about how Steve would try to make it less bad and many of the ways in which he and Peggy succeed in that. But some things are bigger than what they can fight or legislate away (shockingly, just like the present).
>   * I’ve placed a lot on Peggy, as she has to implement most of their strategies, but I’ve placed a lot on Steve too, to remember endless details about decades’ worth of history, how they connect, what the outcomes of changing them might be. It’s impossible for it to go right every time.
>   * I kept wanting to make Steve and Peggy have a fight. Not a permanent fight, or even an overly vicious one, but I think showing two sensible adults who love and respect each other having a disagreement that might even include shouting and then resolving it...that’s good and valuable and even healthy. However, this sort of near-fight seems to be the best I can do. (My first attempt was all the way back in chapter 4, and I didn’t even get close to this level - Peggy ended up being too Tired for it to really work, so I tried again with this sort of companion chapter. I guess maybe someday I’ll get to the real deal?)
>   * Speaking of someday: if you have prompts or I’ve mentioned something in a previous chapter and then never brought it up again, feel free to leave ideas in comments below or drop them in ye olde tumblr ask box. Next chapter or the one after is going to be something of a clip show, so a good time to answer questions that might not have a full chapter’s worth in them.
> 



	31. 1971

The winter Emma turns thirteen, her childhood roundness starts turning into curves (rounded curves, but still), her clothes draping around her in new ways. She’d known that these sorts of changes were meant to be coming - Mom is always very straightforward - but to actually experience them is a different matter.

She manages to conceal things for the most part under some of the heavy sweaters that Nana Barnes had once made for Rosie. She pulls them out of the boxes in the basement where Dad stores the old, outgrown items of clothing that he can’t seem to make himself donate, and adds them to her own wardrobe. The sleeves come only just to her wrists (she’s already taller than Rosie now, and it’s a good thing her sister has long arms), which looks weird, and Mom asks about them because Maryland winters aren’t really cold enough for Nana’s thick Brooklyn wool. But wrapping them around herself feels better, easier, than to try to figure out something else.

Except Emma loves spring, and on the first really warm day, she can’t help but put on her favorite dress from last year, yellow with flowers and a pleated skirt, even though it’s tight in strange places. She wears a sweater over it when Dad drives her to school, keeps holding her books against herself and avoids stopping to talk to her friends in the hallways, and she can’t tell if the tradeoff was worth it.

Mom and Dad don’t say anything at dinner, but there is a glance traded between them in the overlap of Drea’s story about her science teacher and Nate asking if they can go to the library tomorrow because his friend Arnold told him about a book about a mother mouse who goes on adventures that’s apparently very good. The other two don’t seem to notice the way Mom tilts her head from her side of the table and Dad nods from his, but Emma sees.

(That would never have happened when Rosie was still there, because their biggest sister would have seen the way Emma kept picking at her plate, and suddenly everyone would have been focused on a very involved recounting of everything that was happening with the drama club that week. And then later, Rosie would have come into Emma’s room to sit on her bed and explain everything, even how they were going to fix it, and would have made her laugh too. But Rose is 500 miles away, having a great time at college, and so there’s no one to get their parents to look away from Emma.)

That night, she’s in the kitchen baking with Dad. It’s a ritual with them, at least twice a week. He used to make a cake or cookies in the afternoons when Emma was little, but she joined him one day and never looked back, not even tonight.

Tonight they’re making cupcakes, vanilla with pink frosting on top that they’re shaping like spring flowers with their new piping bag set, just like they’d planned. It’s so normal that Emma forgets about that traded glance, stops thinking about how the apron she’s always used doesn’t slip on quite the right way anymore.

Dad waits until she’s finished frosting one of the cupcakes and set it down before he taps the top of her arm for attention.

“Mom - she’s not working on Saturday,” he says, his signing taking on a hesitant quality that she associates with topics much more awkward than her mother’s weekend plans. “If you want to go shopping with her - you might find some new spring dresses. I think you might be a little old for me to pick out your clothes.”

She doesn’t know how to thank him for not making her ask, for not making it strange or shameful. “You got me all of my favorite stuff,” she offers shyly, and gives him a hug around the waist.

* * *

Mom does take her shopping over the weekend (on Sunday in the end; Mom sometimes has to work even when it wasn’t planned) and they find things that actually fit, that make her feel like herself again, even if herself is still changing.

“Come to the yard,” Mom says once they’ve put the bags away in Emma’s room. Emma sighs, the movement involving chest and shoulders and puffed out cheeks. She knows what that means. Their house in New Jersey had a high fence to discourage neighborly prying, and when they’d moved to Maryland, they had a big yard far away from other houses: useful when the children had each taken their turn learning to throw a punch.

"You never know when you'll need something like that," Dad says. They all know that part of it has to do with Mom's work, and part of it comes from the way Dad grew up, but Emma’s never run into either, really.

Mom starts with a bit of a refresher. Making a fist with the thumb on the outside and wrist straight still comes naturally although Em has never really liked the idea of actually punching anyone. But then they move onto other things, moves with her legs and something about using her own weight and leverage to flip a big stuffed model over her shoulder, what to do if someone tries to hurt you when you’re sitting instead of standing. They’ve never done anything like that before. Nate watches from the back window, confused, but when Drea sees what’s happening, she only makes her slim shoulders even smaller and walks away.

"Why are we doing this?" Emma asks when she is finally sweaty enough to have earned a break. She watches carefully for the tiny tics of a lie, nearly impossible to spot on Mom's face, as she takes a drink.

"It's a good skill for a growing girl to have," Mom says, and that her face is entirely truthful just makes Emma feel more out of sorts as she goes in to look through the cookbooks for something that she can bake tonight to make herself feel better.

* * *

At dinner, Dad tells a story about a time when he and Uncle Bucky had to fight four bigger boys. It’s funny, the way he shows Uncle Bucky looking down at him because Dad was littler then, the way he shows everyone squinting at each other like a standoff. But he catches Emma’s eye when he talks about pulling hair or kicking up between the knees if necessary, and she knows that he’s trying to train her in another way.

(The next time they go to bake, there’s a new apron folded on the counter, her name embroidered across the top. When she puts it on, it fits perfectly.)

* * *

 _Mom and Dad are being weird_ , she writes to Rosie. _They keep talking about how to fight if I need to._

 _Mom and Dad are just being Mom and Dad_ , Rosie writes back. The rest of the family does phone calls every week or two, but since Rose moved into her dorm in September she’s said that she loves getting Emma’s letters. Emma likes writing them, likes seeing her thoughts organized on paper, and likes getting Rose’s back, the Massachusetts postmark on the replies and the little creases that represent how far its traveled to her. _They know the kinds of things that can happen in the world, so sometimes they can be a little protective._

That hasn’t been Emma’s experience with her parents. She’s been trusted to use the oven by herself for years, and no one checks to see that she’s reading “appropriate” books, the way her friend Rachel Clarke’s mother does. When she’d had strict Mr. Farrell in fifth grade, Mom had told her sternly not to let him intimidate her and Dad had helped with her reports and packed the best snacks in her lunch bag, but neither of them had stormed into the principal’s office and gotten him fired. But things have been different for Rosie, and not just because she’s older, so Emma assumes that in this she’s gotten it wrong somehow.

* * *

The day after school lets out, she and Drea walk into town to get ice cream. It’s so hot out that their cones are melting as soon as they start back home, and keeping control of the dripping takes attention and agility. It’s too hard to hold a conversation, but Emma notices when Drea jumps and glares over her shoulder at the car speeding around the corner.

“Did it get too close?” she pesters, her hands sticky but finally empty as they approach the house. “I would have noticed if they drove so close.”

“No,” Drea says slowly, finally answering, though her fingers drift slowly shut and linger on the word for a strangely long time. “They didn’t get too close. They just—They were shouting at us.”

“We didn’t do anything wrong.”

“Sometimes,” Drea tells her, a peculiar look on her face, “a girl walking - that’s enough.” Seeing the confusion on Emma’s face, Drea wraps an arm around her sister. “We’re okay. The wrong ones - that’s them. We should be able to walk down the street looking however we want.”

Emma looks down at her peachy pink blouse and the striped skirt that matches it. She had bought them only a few months ago. The buttons running up the center of the skirt had seemed a cute touch, fun. She hadn’t even really considered them when she left the house that morning, but now they seem awkward, a mistake.

She starts to have an inkling of why Mom keeps taking her to the backyard even though she still refuses to put in much effort there. Maybe next time she’ll try to be different.

* * *

The following Saturday, Emma wakes up to a sweet-smelling breeze blowing through her open window and knows that today will be a gardening day. A few hours later, they are all outside.

(Not Rosie - she was invited to go on a trip with one of her new friends and now she won’t be back until almost August.)

Over by the new flowers they are planting, Dad playfully adjusts the sun hat Mom is wearing, even though it would make more sense for her to do it herself - she has on her gardening gloves as usual, but Dad always sticks his hands directly into the earth and already has dirt under his fingernails and in the creases of his palms. As they both kneel at the edge of the flowerbed, he puts his fingers to Mom’s cheek as he kisses her and it leaves little streaks against the cream of her skin. He brushes it away with the edge of his wrist and says something that makes Mom laugh.

She knows that Drea, checking for bugs at the other end of the bed from Emma, is saying something. Nate, who already finished the small bed he was working on, has gone to get his pad and drawing pencils. He sits with his mouth open slightly and tongue poking out, listening to their sister. When he sees Emma look up at them, he raises an eyebrow to ask if she wants him to interpret, even goes to put his pencil down, but she shakes her head and runs her finger over a soft leaf. She doesn’t need chatter right now, just the blue sky and the warm sun, her family around her, her hands busily working on a task they already know exactly how to do.

Later, after they have finished with the flowers in front and then the vegetable garden in back, when they have made sure the peach trees are thinned enough and then cleared or collected the June drop fruit (Dad will try to ripen them up and use the best of them to make jam and cobbler in the next few days; she has an idea about adding raspberries to their usual cobbler recipe that she thinks he’ll like), once Nate has convinced Dad to make a little peach syrup to try with lemonade and they have decided that they’ll try again with the more flavorful crop later in the summer, after Emma has had a bath, put her capri pants with their muddy, grass-stained knees into the laundry room, eaten dinner in her cotton pajamas with the still-warm breeze playing against the kitchen curtains...later, she asks Dad to come read with her.

He doesn’t chide that she’s too old for it, a teenager now, doesn’t remind her that they slowly dropped off with such routines years ago. Instead, he picks up his book and swings a hand toward her: “Come on.” Though she can’t catch the title as she makes her way upstairs, his book is pretty, with brightly colored trees on the front; it’s been a while since she saw Dad not reading notes or textbooks or something for a class assignment and she realizes that this is summer vacation for him too.

She hasn’t actually been read aloud to since probably third or fourth grade, when the chapter books she was picking made it harder and harder for her dad to sign the stories to her; she kept peeking over his shoulder, eager to know what happened next, her eyes racing over the words faster than he could convey. For the next few years they compromised instead, each reading their own book together in the evenings, until that eventually stopped too.

Curling up beneath his arm is still so familiar, even if it’s not routine anymore. She opens _Up a Road Slowly_ and starts to read, but she has barely even finished a chapter before her blinks are pressing long, the book drooping over her chest. Vaguely, she feels Dad kiss her hair as he picks the book up from her chest. She knows that in the morning she will find it bookmarked at her page, resting on top of the copy of _Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret_ , that Tina Lasko gave her for her birthday because all the girls in school were talking about it, but that Emma stopped reading (the beginning was okay, but then she heard what was going to come later and put it down).

Just before she falls asleep, she thinks that she would like to live in this day forever, never grow up, just have this day and this day and this day...

* * *

A few nights later, she sets the table fresh from her bath, her curls still long and darkened down her back, dampening her nightgown. They were out in the garden again today, just doing a brief check of things, before she and Nate rode their bikes into town to go to the library - she hasn’t finished her book yet, but Nate wanted company and she was bored enough to agree. Mom’s just come home and they will eat soon and it has been another wonderful day.

She isn’t sure how it starts, really. Dad sets the platter of meatloaf on the table - his is better than most, not mushy and with vegetables and a sauce that isn’t just ketchup; Emma would rather have chicken if he’s asked her, but Dad likes to make it for Drea sometimes, special - and before he turns to get the potatoes, he asks if she is going to try out for the basketball team this year. Eighth graders are allowed to be on the team at her school, even if it’s pretty rare for them to make it.

And even though the answer could easily be yes (she’s not really tall, but her aim is good and she and Drea are pretty well neck and neck for wins at H-O-R-S-E) somehow she finds herself getting worked up over just that question. Before she knows it, even as something inside her says that this doesn’t make sense, that she should calm down, she has slammed down the knives she is holding so she can use both hands. And ignoring his gentle responses, looking away from the steadiness she has always loved, she tells her father that he never stops _pushing_ her, he and Mom are so _bossy_ , they never just let her _be_ , why can’t she just enjoy her summer, why is he always asking questions, he doesn’t understand, she _hates_ him.

She closes her bedroom door hard, then opens it again to give it a real slam that she can feel even through the thick wood of the frame and floor. Face down in her pillow, she screams, the feeling grating and growling its way up her throat, then cries for a while even though she doesn’t understand why.

Later, she sits up against the wall, her pillow hugged against her chest. She has her book open in her lap, but she has barely turned a page.

The light flips off and then on again, off and on, then twice more. She knows it’s Nate - he’s the only one who flicks the outside switch for her room four times instead of three to let her know he’s there - but she doesn’t move or make a sound. He pokes his head in anyway. Seeing her on the bed, not crying anymore, he comes in and sits at the foot.

“We ate, but Dad says there’s a plate for you. You can get something from the fridge, maybe.”

He says it exactly like normal, as if she hadn’t just exploded downstairs, as if she wasn’t just awful to her father.

“Is he mad?” she asks, and even the angry face she puts on for the sign is tentative. “Does he hate me?”

Nate shakes his head. “Rosie slammed a lot more doors than you. Dad loves her. He loves you.”

When she goes downstairs, Dad is washing the dinner dishes. She sits at the table looking down at her plate and he gives her a little smile over his shoulder before he turns back to the soapy water. It makes her want to cry again, but instead she stands up and goes to tap him on the shoulder.

“I’m sorry,” she signs, the circling on her chest reminding her of the times he rubbed her back to help her sleep or when she had a cough or as she cried because someone had made her feel bad. Now, the tears do come, filling her eyes. “I was mean to you. I hurt you.”

Dad wraps his arms around her, his chin atop her head. His hands are wet against her back, against her bare arms as he gently moves her away so he can speak.

“It’s hard - I know,” he says. “Kindness is hard work sometimes,” and his understanding, the way he doesn’t reassure that she has not hurt him, just makes her want to keep ahold of herself so she never does it again, even though she knows that he would forgive her then too.

* * *

Mrs. Walker calls asking if Rosie is back to babysit the next afternoon. She used to watch Brian and Sandra every few weeks when she was in high school. When Drea tells her no, Rose won’t finish her trip for another few weeks, Drea gets offered the job instead, and when she says that she has plans, Mrs. Walker suggests Emma.

As she gets her book and a sweater so Mom can drive her over, she asks Drea, “Are they desperate?” She’s feeling as if she must have been desperate in order to agree to do this in the first place. She was only looking for something new to break the monotony of the days because her school friends don’t live in town and she had turned down the offer of day camp or the school’s summer program. Plus, she was eager for the forty cents an hour that she had been offered. (She knows that Rose would sometimes hold out for up to seventy-five, and she charged a dollar after midnight , but that’s Rose.)

Drea, leaning against the doorframe, shrugs. She isn’t busy, she just didn’t want to go. “Husband on a business trip - she wants a break, time alone.”

That’s obvious once Emma has waved to Mom and knocked on the door. Mrs. Walker opens it right away, her handbag already over her elbow. She has a little notebook out and tears off the top page, handing it to Emma and waiting - foot just this side of tapping, but still - for her to read it.

Brian is apparently staying with his grandparents in Delaware which leaves her only watching Sandra, who is just a toddler and meant to go to bed by half past six anyway. That’s a relief: Brian is seven and bossy, and one reason Rose is such a popular choice for the Walkers is that she’s bossier. Sandra is content to dabble her feet in the inflatable pool for a while before coming inside to play while Emma warms up the pasta bake that Mrs. Walker left in the refrigerator. Getting Sandra for bed makes her feel simultaneously brilliant (no one had to tell her to save bath time for after dinner - she’d figured that out all on her own even before she saw all that drippy red sauce and Sandra’s preference to eat with her hands) and entirely foolish (apparently babies do _not_ stay still when you’re trying to put a diaper on them - even when there are pins involved!).

It’s still light out when she sits down to read in the big armchair facing the street. The drapes are open and when she looks up every so often, she can see parents getting home from work, then families taking walks and visiting neighbors, kids running and biking in the street, narrow columns of barbecue smoke that she can nearly smell. She gets up to check on Sandra every ten or fifteen minutes though she seems to be sleeping fairly deeply just like Mrs. Walker had said she would, the room dark and warm.

When she comes downstairs again after peeking into the baby’s room, Emma notices a car coming slowly down the street. It’s a white Ford Mustang, fairly new looking. (Mom was always having them play different “spot the car” games when they were driving to Maine or Brooklyn, finding certain license plates or keeping track of which car had been on the highway with them for the longest amount of time; they got really good last summer.) The driver waits for the kids to run to the sides of the street, then keeps driving.

Five minutes later, Emma looks up from her book to see that the car is back again, circling the block in that same slow manner.

She checks the clock. Mrs. Walker was supposed to be going for a hair appointment and then to a movie with a friend. She told Emma that she wouldn’t be out later than 8:30. It’s quarter to now.

Her book is pretty good, and she’s getting close to the end, but she finds herself losing focus, glancing up as the car circles another time. The bugs are coming out and the sun is going down. Lots of people are inside now. The driver doesn't have to wait to drive along. None of the neighbors brush their curtains aside to watch the next slow slide down the street, the way the passenger side window rolls down and Emma thinks she can see someone leaning over the seat, staring toward her, though the inside of the car is so dark and she can't tell for sure.

She goes to check on Sandra, and even though nothing is amiss there, she finds herself sitting against the crib, the slats propping her back up. She tries to think through a plan.

She doesn't want to leave Sandra, doesn't want to wake her to go over to a neighbor's house to ask them to call. They don't seem worried, and besides, she can call herself. When they moved to town, Mom had taken Emma to the police station and introduced her to the officers. She remembered being in an office, tall men all around, watching her from very high, and a few women with big hair.

"In case of emergency," Mom had told them, as if she was able to give them orders, which apparently she was, "Emma knows the number of the station and, if possible, will tap out her name in Morse code against the receiver rather than a simple SOS to help you identify her." They had practiced it at home - a short tap, four long taps, a short, one last long - and even once with the agreement of the local emergency workers. A firetruck had come to their house and the firefighters had waved at them. Nate had drawn a picture of it that hung on the fridge for months.

She could call them now. A policeman would be here in only a few minutes; they would be able to find where she was using the phone line, and the Walkers lived much closer to the center of town than her family did. But what if it is only someone from nearby out for a drive in the warm summer air? Does she want to call the police for that?

A real babysitter would know these sorts of things. A real grownup would know when the right time was. Emma just wants to ask her parents, wants them to take care of it all.

Downstairs again, she sets her jaw and finds the phone, stretching the cord so it sits on the table beside her chair just in case. Then she goes to find a pad of paper and when the car returns, she writes down everything she can see about it: the make and color, her estimation of the year, the license plate number, the sort of scratch on one door. She lists how many times it has driven by already and approximately when. She thinks it is what her mother would do.

And then another car pulls up beside the strange one, this one her own familiar station wagon, drives around and parks in the Walker’s driveway. Mom steps out and goes over to where the car is still meandering, bends her head toward the driver's window and speaks for a moment.

The car drives away. When Mom comes up the path to wait for the last few minutes before Mrs. Walker returns, Emma opens the door and steps out to hug her tightly.

"Why was the car waiting around?" she asks as they walk up their own driveway. Mrs. Walker had come back smiling and paid Emma an extra ten cents.

Mom answers, "The driver wanted to find Oakdale Drive, but was confused and lost on Oak Way. I gave directions." In the moonlight, she peers over at Emma and stops her with a hand to her wrist. She brushes Emma's hair back from her face with gentle fingers. "I know you must have been scared," she says. "But you noticed and made good choices. You were smart, careful to protect yourself and the baby." She runs a finger over where Emma’s torn off list sticks out from the top of her book.

When she has trouble sleeping that night, imagining eyes looking out at her from within darkened cars, she thinks of Mom's words and tries to remember that she is brave.

* * *

On the Fourth of July, it doesn’t get dark until late. There’s plenty of time to go for the party at the Deaf club in D.C. and still be able to find a spot to watch the fireworks.

Emma watches Dad out of the corner of her eye. There are kids at her school whose hearing parents never come to these sorts of events, who won't even drop them off, so she knows that she should be grateful that her whole family is here. Drea and Nate stand in a group of kids they’ve met before, Mom over in the corner with Eric Blanchard's father who is the chapter president, and Dad signs with some other parents. No matter what she tries to tell herself, she feels a little embarrassed watching him. The other parents are Deaf, and even though Dad's pretty good at ASL, he's not exactly a native speaker.

At least he's not trying to make everyone watch the slides from their trip to the Grand Canyon last summer again. (People did seem pretty interested when he had brought them a few months ago, but _still_.)

Her focus is broken by a wave in front of her. She brings her eyes back to Albie Duncan, who is grinning at her so that she can see the chip in his canine tooth.

"Question," Albie starts, and she tilts her head to allow it, even as his grin turns nervous. "Want to go on a date with me?"

She considers. Albie's a year older than she is, but sweet and he does good impressions of the teachers. She's never really thought about him being handsome, but she guesses that his hair is good, thick brown and swooping up in the front, and she does like his smile.

"Okay," she nods. "My parents - I'll check with them. Where do you want to go?"

Albie lives a couple of towns over, but finally they agree to get ice cream at a place in the middle. Emma hopes they'll be able to find it without too much trouble.

When she looks away from Albie, she finds Dad still standing with his group but looking at her. The smile he gives her is one she has never seen before, sort of sighing and twisted at one corner, even as his eyes look the same as they always have.

* * *

Drea drives home from the fireworks with Mom in the front guiding her. Nate falls asleep pretty quickly, curled up against Dad in the backseat.

Emma, on Dad's other side, watches out the window for a while as the other towns nearby celebrate Independence Day too. Before long, her head drops against his shoulder.

He angles his hands toward her, and as they pass beneath the streetlights, she can just make out what he is saying.

"Don't grow up too fast, okay?"

She closes her eyes and gives a little nod into his shirt. She plans on growing up at exactly the right speed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Uuuuugh.
> 
> I meant to get this up on Sunday - I've had a big chunk of it ready for months - but this chapter WOULD NOT STOP. I absolutely don’t know how it got out of hand like this, especially when the outline was like eight words long.
> 
> Love to the Home and Garden Information Center at the UMD Extension for their [list of things a gardener might be doing in Maryland in June](https://extension.umd.edu/hgic/june-tips-tasks).
> 
> Steve is reading _Wide Sargasso Sea_ with its [original cover art](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/1/1e/JeanRhys_WideSargassoSea.jpg) (He’s five years late, but he’s been busy!) Emma is five years late too - Irene Hunt’s _Up a Road Slowly_ was also published in 1966 - but she’s been a child. _Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret_ by Judy Blume was published only slightly before this chapter (1970) and many of the same reasons it was so popular at the time - candid discussion of periods, developing bodies, and sexual attraction, so much of the business of growing up - are the same ones that make Emma nervous.
> 
> I chose not to ask my mother about her experiences babysitting/being babysat in the sixties and seventies, but I did enjoy [this discussion ](http://www.city-data.com/forum/work-employment/1928128-babysitting-rate-when-you-used-babysit.html) about rates and disparate diapering practices.


	32. 1997

“Goodness,” says Peggy, folding herself down with slow grace onto the sofa. “I have no idea how we managed this for all those years.”

“We stopped at four, and only had one toddler at a time?” Steve suggests, picking up the last of the toys and tossing them into the chest they keep around for these sorts of occasions. Usually they try to enforce cleanup before bed, but Tess and Julie had gotten so worked up after dinner, chasing each other around hysterical with laughter, that it was a wonder they got to bed at all. Then there had been a fight between the older ones, Max furious that Will and Luke were leaving him out of their game, which had necessitated a quiet group discussion on kindness and inclusion, apologies, stubbornly rejected apologies, consolations...After all that, they barely got to play at all before it was time for them to go to bed too.

Steve and Peggy have taken Luke and Tess on a pretty regular basis over the past couple of years - Eleanor had really struggled after Tess was born, and though she and Nate don’t need the respite the way they once did, a sleepover with the grandparents about every month is routine. When Eric had asked if they would take the other three too (he wanted to take Emma away for the weekend, a combination birthday celebration and brief vacation from her - most likely first - term as councilwoman) it had seemed manageable. And, Steve supposes, they have indeed managed: the children are safe and fed and still in possession of all the limbs they were dropped off with. It was just more effort than he had thought it would be.

(He wonders if Cam, the only cousin who doesn’t live in the area, considers himself lucky that he can avoid all of the craziness outside of holidays spent together, or if he is jealous at missing out. For his part, Steve wouldn’t have said no to spending this evening reading with Cam, or watching him play around on his new computer or whatever he might be doing.)

The living room floor finally tidied, Steve takes his own spot on the couch. He puts an arm around Peggy, readjusting when she shifts to rest her head against his chest. Pressing a kiss to her hair, he notices the roots of silver and white strands joining the iron gray. He kisses there again, firmly.

It’s very quiet - no whispers from upstairs or feet creaking quietly from one room to another, and the January chill has chased away even the birds and crickets. “I keep thinking,” Steve says after a few minutes in the silence, “that in fifty or seventy or a hundred years, these kids might be the only people who remember us.”

“That’s a bit morbid.”

“Maybe, but it’s true. Your name might come up in the history textbooks - ‘groundbreaking head of SHIELD from 1949 until…’” He trails off leadingly and barely catches her smile; she’s stepped back quite a lot and has for about ten years been setting up her succession, but she still hasn’t let go entirely of her position or her title. It’s a running joke between them, and he thinks she might be as surprised as he will the day she finally decides to retire completely. “But the people who truly know us...In a generation, those memories will be mostly gone.”

She makes a slight humming sound. “I think that’s likely the way things are meant to be. Immortality, as you know better than most, sounds quite exhausting. But we’ve done all we can with the time we’ve had, and we’ll do more with the rest of it. And after that, even if the two of us aren’t precisely remembered, think of the immortality of what we’ve created: all the good that the next generation does, and the one after that, that will be ours in a way too. A seed we planted, even if we aren’t there to see it.” Despite the eveningtime contemplative tone of her voice, there’s a sadness there too. He knows that she is thinking of Howard, gone two months now without seeing his son married, without meeting any grandchildren that may come, and of Jarvis too, whose memory lapses are growing larger and no longer excusable as small slips of the mind.

“Then let’s hope that the fort Julie and Tess were building earlier isn’t a precursor to a lair, or that will reflect pretty badly on us,” he says with soft humor, and she rewards him with a laugh.

He closes his eyes, just sitting there, holding his wife. “I think we’ve done pretty well, though,” he adds finally, the quiet pride obvious even to one who doesn’t know him as well as she.

“We have.” She sits up a bit to look around the room. “And we were right to keep the house, too. Sometimes it might be too big, but at times like this, it seems to me precisely the right size.”

“We would have to stack those kids in pretty tight if we were in an apartment,” he agrees. He pushes himself up to stand. “Hard to dance in one, too.”

“I can’t imagine what sort of dancing you’re thinking of that would require much space,” she says, looking with pointed politeness at his outstretched hand. “I think my more athletic days are fairly far behind me.”

“Only with that sort of attitude.” He can feel the smile crinkling the skin by his eyes. “Come on. They’re playing our song.”

He’s said that so often over the years, with all sorts of music, or as is the case tonight, none at all. She places her hand in his and rises to her feet. His arms around her, the hush broken only by their feet against the carpet, the lights low and the children asleep upstairs...she wouldn’t trade any of it.

* * *

Nate drives over in Emma’s van to pick up the whole carload of kids on Sunday, thanking his parents and turning down the offer of pancakes, no, Dad, it’s fine, oh they’re chocolate chip? Maybe just one or two...

(He doesn’t show up forty-five minutes early just because of the distance between his house and his parents’.)

Will is just tall enough now to sit in the front seat, and he takes it as both a solemn responsibility and his absolute right.

“Gran and Grandpa were dancing,” he reports as Nate starts down the long driveway to the road. “Right in the living room. I got up in the night and saw them.” He sounds slightly scandalized, like a nosy neighbor discovering topless sunbathing going on next door.

Nate laughs. “Oh, believe me. That sounds just about right.”

“Well, how come they were?”

Shrugging at his nephew, Nate turns on his blinker, although out here they don’t really need to; there are rarely other cars driving by. “It’s just the sort of thing they do. It’s not the first time, and it won’t be the last. If you’re in love one day, you’ll understand.”

“I don’t _think_ so.” Will turns to look out the window. He speaks to the glass. “It was a little bit nice, seeing them like that.”

His parents have been married forty-five years and despite everything they’ve gone through, because of everything they’ve gone through, are still the strongest couple he knows. One day he hopes his own kids or grandkids will look at him and Elle and think of them that way.

“Trust me, kiddo.” He reaches over and ruffles Will’s thick hair. “I know exactly what you mean.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know there's some real LCE (last chapter energy) to this one, but my outline idea (weekend with the grandparents, 1997) just turned into this. We're not at the end quite yet.


	33. 1984

The first day of her bar exam, Drea knows that she is supposed to wake up and get right out of bed, considering the three alarms she has set. Instead she lies there for a few moments and thinks of the times she would come downstairs when she couldn’t sleep and find her parents sitting up together in the kitchen. How one of them would make tea for her, hot and strong and sweet, in those blue flowered mugs they’d had, before settling in to talk about the test the next day that was making her too nervous for sleep or some issue that she was having with a classmate or teacher. “Just do what you can,” her dad used to tell her. “Because what you can do is pretty amazing.”

She remembers nasty kids on the playground saying her parents couldn’t _really_ love her, that she wasn’t their _real_ kid, remembers thinking of those nights of quiet listening and steady voices and Dad’s hand certain on her shoulder, knowing like the blood running through her veins that it was real and screw anyone who said otherwise. There were plenty of other parts of her that were vulnerable to that sort of bullying, but in this she was secure: her parents, her family, would love her through anything.

Lou bangs on her door, shouting through the wood, interrupting the memory. “Get up, Carter, the alarm you set in my room just went off. Test’s today!” There’s the sound of her footsteps shuffling back to bed, and Drea sighs and smiles just a little and gets out of bed.

* * *

Her friend Greg told her to try not to run over case law and testing tips in her head, to leave her flashcards at home and bring a book or her portable cassette player instead. She has a book in her bag, but she doesn’t take it out even when she finds a seat on the T. Instead she gazes through the window, finding the Citgo sign tucked into the skyline across the river. She looks around at the other morning commuters, summer students and tourists beside businesspeople. There is one woman who seems not to let hanging onto a strap distract her from reading a half folded newspaper; she wears a loose, gorgeous royal blue pantsuit with a lace-collared blouse and pearls. It makes Drea look down at the outfit she’d laid out the night before - a belted gray skirt and an orange and white striped T-shirt - with disatisfaction.

Last Thanksgiving, she had been in the kitchen while they waited for Emma and Eric to finish eating with his family. She was in charge of some kind of cranberry relish recipe that Dad had clipped out, Mom had been mashing potatoes, and Rose (off the cooking roster permanently outside of necessity) had been sliding cloth napkins into the just-polished napkin rings. Drea and Rosie had started trading off stories across the table: worst law school professors, times they had been hit on by partners or associates or interns at the law firms that they had each worked at. When Rose was repeatedly asked to serve coffee in meetings, she apparently produced progressively worse pots until they stopped. Drea had started putting up a rotation list in the conference rooms and referring people to that, trying to make them realize the inequity themselves; it still hadn’t entirely worked.

And as frustrating and awful as the stories were, in a strange way she had found herself reveling in the conversation. In the understanding there, but also in talking with her sister.

From the time she was fourteen, Drea had known she wanted to be a lawyer. She’d been open about her plans with teachers and friends, her debate teammates and especially her family. And then, just as she was starting to study for the LSAT, Rose had announced that she had taken the exam months earlier and would soon be starting at Columbia Law.

Drea had spent so long feeling as if she were some sort of runner up Rose: smart, but from studying and working for it rather than Rosie’s natural sharpness, bold enough to get by but not quite as brave as her sister. And so she was glad that even though they lived barely hours away from each other, they only saw each other a couple of times a year. She couldn’t pretend any more often than that to be okay with Rose taking her goal, taking it first, probably doing better than she would. Rose had graduated with a motley collection of majors and minors and simply fallen into working for a domestic violence organization after her volunteering in college, and Knowing what she wanted and putting in the work to get there had been the only thing that made Drea feel that she was best at something. She had been so angry that this thing, her thing, her one thing, was being taken from her. But now, she listened to her sister speak, watched her hands trace around the air, and found not competition between them but comfort, companionship. As if maybe having a sister in the same business wouldn’t be so bad. As if maybe they could both find ways to make their mark beside each other.

Rose finished telling a story about being taken aside by the one female partner at a law firm where she was working over the summer. “Wear a skirt suit,” the woman had advised. “The others don’t like it when you try to put on their pants, you know.” Then she had waited for Rose to laugh and agree.

“I haven’t even let myself look at pantsuits,” Drea admitted. “I know everyone expects skirts. It’s supposed to be the professional thing, I guess,” and their mother had set down the potato masher and sighed. Though she wore a smile, it was sadder and more worn than anything they usually saw, the sort of thing only their father would be familiar with.

“I had hoped we would be beyond this sort of thing by now,” she told them. “I had hoped that the problems, the barriers, I had when I was beginning my career would be obsolete by the time my daughters were beginning theirs. But it seems as if so very many things are precisely the same.”

“I’m sure it’s better, Mom,” Drea offered. “At least a little, it’s better. There are sexual harassment laws now, laws against hiring descrimination, you can’t get fired for being pregnant...I know it seems like all of the problems still exist only underground and having laws on the books can’t fix everything, but things are better than they were, and you were a part of that.”

“And for the next part,” Rose said, trading a glance with her sister. “For the rest of it, we’ll be here, to make things even better for the ones who come after. Just like you taught us.”

* * *

She looks around the testing room as everyone is filing in to get settled. She sees familiar faces from her classes or around campus, from internships, panels and events. Carl is sitting at the next table over. Tom and Denise from the exam prep course walk in together. Her friend Celia is too far to speak to, but they smile at each other for courage.

And then it is time to begin.

She knows that she’s meant to be focusing only on the questions in front of her, and she does seem to be at least somewhat - her pencil marks the page nearly as soon as she finishes reading. But she also can’t help but think of the importance of this day, how everything, her whole life, has built and led here. She thinks of listening to her parents talking politics and policy around mouthfuls of morning toast, of study groups and late nights of debate practice, of disappointing grades that just made her grit her teeth and try harder the next time. She thinks of two diplomas with “Veritas” at the top and her name beneath.

Andrea Mastro Carter: one name from each set of parents, and one she gave herself. After the adoptions went through, they had all shared the same last name, but Mom and Dad always told them that they could pick middle names if they wanted - she and Nate hadn’t been given them at birth. So when she was twelve they had gone to court and she had added back her original family name, just to keep it alive somehow. Nate, when he had gone a few years later, had taken the initial M rather than a full name. She knows he did it not from some sort of loyalty to the past he doesn’t really remember but because it would mean something to her, and that touches her more than words.

(When she was little, Emma would say that she was just going to have her middle name be Rose too. Later, she would try to choose between dozens of possibilities, making lists that seemed simply copied from Famous Women of History and Literature. Finally, though, she chose Jane. “I think,” she had said, “that there were probably a lot of women named Jane who lived good, quiet lives - they were so quiet that we don’t remember them. I’ll name myself for them.”)

She thinks of the summer they moved from New Jersey, driving to the Maryland house with all of the car windows rolled down for a breeze. With boxes still in their rooms, Dad woke them up one morning and shuffled them all into the car so they could be in Washington by 8. It wasn’t early enough: the city was already packed with people, and even at seven years old, she felt the tension all around. She doesn’t know that she has ever held her mother’s hand as tightly.

And then they were marching with the crowd, walking surrounded by more people than she had ever seen, toward buildings that she had only seen in pictures. The signs people were carrying said things about jobs and freedom and equality and something called civil rights. Some of it she understood, and Mom and Dad had answered questions when they could, but she knows that she didn’t understand the significance, not then.

It was hot: seventy-five by 10 A.M. and hotter throughout the day. The dress that she had picked out, still excited about getting to wear such things without being questioned, was pretty but heavy, sweaty against her skin. They were gathered for a long time, listening to all different speeches and songs. It was harder and harder to concentrate as the day went on; Drea started playing hand-clapping games with Rose, tic-tac-toe on a piece of scrap paper with Emma.

And then a new man had come up to the podium, and Dad had put Nate onto his shoulders so he could see. Drea had never heard someone talk the way this man did. Even then, when she didn’t quite understand, she leaned forward to listen to him talking about his dream, heard the people shout encouragement and agreement back at him and nearly did it herself. Next to her, Rose had turned to their mother and said, “You’re important too, Mom. You should go up and speak to everyone.” But Mom had shaken her head and said, “No, today isn’t the time for me. This is the time for Dr. King and those who are leading with him.”

She remembers, too, a time she went to lunch with Aunt Layla and Libby one summer when she was in New York. Libby was urging them along, worried they would miss the reservation Aunt Layla had called for at a new restaurant; the others were racing to keep up with her, laughing a bit as they did. (Though Drea was secretly glad someone was trying to get them there in time; Layla was smart and very good at her job, but she had “just five minutes”ed them when they had come to find her in her office, and then did it again when they found her in the lab until they were cutting it quite close.)

“Barnes, party of three,” Aunt Layla said, still a bit breathless from running and laughter, when they arrived just in time.

The host looked up at her, scanning not her lovely cream linen skirt or her bright smile but instead her shade-darker skin, her striking eyes. He said, without pause, “I apologize, someone must have misinformed you. We are quite full up this afternoon.”

“Excuse me?” Aunt Layla didn’t raise her voice, but Drea could see the way her hand spasmed into a fist against her thigh. “I called this morning. I was told our booking was confirmed.”

“As I said.” A tiny shrug; the polite smile hadn’t shifted, but now Drea could see it was more like indifference. “I apologize, Mrs. Barnes.”

Aunt Layla grabbed Libby’s hand. Drea thought about how her parents could find hers without looking just as easily. “That’s _Doctor_ Barnes,” she had said, and walked out with her head high. Drea had admired her so much, even as she felt overcome with the small, protected cruelty of it, the expectation that there was nothing that would be done in retaliation.

(Later, Aunt Layla would tell her that she had barely remembered saying anything. “I just wanted to get you girls out of there. _I_ just wanted to get out of there.” She patted Drea's arm. “It's everywhere and has been for my whole life, and my parents’ too, and it still feels like it comes out of nowhere, Drea love.”)

When they break for lunch, someone at the table with her asks what area of law they’re each looking to go into. Drea doesn’t hesitate. She has spent years thinking about the ways the law protects her and the ways it doesn’t, how her voice could be valuable in standing up for others, how the law can’t change people’s minds but sometimes it is what they have. “Public defender first, probably, but eventually civil rights,” she says when it’s her turn, and when a couple of those sitting with her snort she just smiles.

* * *

When they are dismissed for the day, her eyes are gritty, the muscles of her hand exhausted. All her muscles are exhausted, in fact - her back and shoulders, her restless legs - and she’ll have to be back again tomorrow. She’s torn between wanting an hour-long bath and just crawling into bed. But when she reaches the corner she finds herself not walking down the stairs to catch the T, but instead entering the phone booth and dialing a number that she hadn’t realized she knew by heart.

“Rose Carter.” Her sister answers firmly on the first ring. (Rosie had decided not to take a middle name, but instead to remove the one she was given at birth. She said she already had all the name she needed.)

“Hi. It’s me.”

“Hey. Hang on.” There’s a clunking in the background, then Rose faintly telling someone that she’s talking to her sister and she’ll have the documents within the hour.

“Sorry,” Rose says, clear again. “Wasn’t today the first day of the bar? How are you feeling about it?” (They had talked briefly about the exam at Emma’s wedding last month before Drea cut it off, feeling overwhelmed. Rose had understood right away.)

Instead of answering, Drea asks, “Where do you get your pantsuits?”

“Is this a joke? About the kids businesswear section or something?”

“No, I was just—I’ve been thinking a lot today, and I was wondering if I could come to New York. Maybe we could go shopping for something new for work.”

“Sounds like you’re pretty confident about how it went,” says Rose, just a bit of teasing sing-song in her voice.

“We’ll see. This was only day one,” Drea replies, starting to grin a little herself. “But either way, I thought I could maybe come see you.”

“Of course you can,” says Rose, the words softer but even more definitive for it. Drea picks at a sticker on the side of the payphone and swallows against the lump in her throat. “ _Of course_ you can, always, whenever you want. I might have to work - no rest for the new hires - but you should come, get a feel for another office. And afterward, we’ll go pick out some kickass clothes for you. I have the feeling you’re going to need them.”

* * *

The first day of her new job, Drea dresses in a burgundy pantsuit and a silver and white striped blouse.

“You look great!” Grace tells her as Drea comes into the kitchen. Louise’s girlfriend is leaning against the counter in a big sweatshirt and a pair of socks, spooning up the last of her cereal.

“Thanks,” says Drea. “My sister helped pick it.”

“Well, good luck,” Lou tells her as she joins them, wrapping an arm around Grace’s shoulders. “Knock ‘em dead, Carter.”

“Not a great idea when they’re your new bosses, I’m pretty sure.”

“Go!” The other two laugh, and start to shoo her out the door.

She takes her bag from the hook, double checks that the note her parents sent wishing her luck (Mom’s handwriting on one side, Dad’s and a little illustration of Lady Justice on the other) is tucked into her pocket. Deep breath, in and out.

“Okay,” she says aloud. “I’m ready.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wish I had really specific info about how the bar exam differed in the 80s vs. now, but I don't. [This quora thread](https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-experience-of-taking-the-bar-exam) does lead me to believe that things have been largely similar testwise for a while, though, so idk, let's just hope I'm right enough.
> 
> This definitely comes from the part of me that recently watched Fleabag and thought, “Okay, the priest thing is interesting and fraught and whatever, but the most potent and compelling love story of this show is the one between two sisters who are so different and often don’t like each other, these two messed up and often horrible people who are bonded by shared memories and shared grief, who still love each other and know each other better than anyone.”
> 
> Also, I'm really sorry, and I know that fashion is of its time and nothing looks good forever, but 1980s clothes were _bad_.


	34. 1958

On Saturday, after the sun goes down, she buries him in the sand up to his waist. He holds still for her, disturbing the sand only once every so often as he leans up to kiss her.

The night settles around them, mild and lovely. The waves slide in and out; it is dark enough now, the moon a day away from full but fuzzed over by clouds, and they are far enough away from the lights of the cottages that they can’t see the crests breaking against the shore anymore, only hear the water.

When she has finished her work, she curls herself against him, both her arms around his, a kiss pressed to his shoulder. She is still wearing her sundress from when they went to supper, covered now by one of his big cardigans. There is sand in the knit at this point, and the sleeves fall over her hands.

“I’ll wash it,” she tells him.

“I wasn’t going to say anything.”

“Yes, that sounds like you all over,” she says, amusement beneath the words. “Keeping your mouth shut when you have an opinion about the right thing to be done.”

Nearly every day together, building into years, and they haven’t had their fill of moments like this, the small moments of just the two of them talking one to the other about nothing in particular.

She feels young tonight - not untried, but unburdened in a way that she hasn’t been in years. Even when they are at home together, she is so aware of all of her responsibilities. She takes them on gladly, trusts herself to do the work properly, the best it can be done, but the past decade has whirled away from her. Between helping found SHIELD, Steve returning, finding Bucky, getting married, trying to wrangle the world without anyone realizing, falling pregnant and then losing the pregnancies, adding Rose to the family…

This weekend has been their first time away since Rose came to their home. Bucky had been the one to insist on the trip, volunteered himself to watch Rose, assured them that he knew her schedule and would help her with her homework, pushed them to choose somewhere like Cape Cod so as to be at a sufficient distance that they wouldn’t simply come back at the first opportunity but close enough to be back quickly in a true emergency. And, Peggy admits now, he was right to urge them to take some time for themselves. Living day by day it is easy to forget the fullness of what she has, to be caught in the forward motion without reflecting on all that’s happened.

Of all her titles - agent, director, wife - “mother” is the one that she came to with the least self-direction. Everything else had been a goal, ambition, hoped for and worked for and held close. The first time she found herself pregnant it was not precisely planned; only once it was there did she find that she wanted it, not only for Steve and his joy but for herself, and only once gone did she find how much. There had been all of those meetings with the adoption caseworkers once they had decided to go through the process, and she had perceived all the answering of questions, the examination of their home and the details of their life, as her own examination of what it would mean to be a parent.

She had not fully realized, might not even have internalized had someone told her, the ways it would change everything. How her calendar would be different, filled with school events and checkups, her time now less her own than it had ever been. How the quiet moments with her husband that she so treasured would be more limited now, and filled with different conversation than they had been before. How when she made those choices at work which would shift the future of everything, the future now had a particular face.

Rose defies the sort of simple, lovely descriptors that people might want to hear about their children. She is not a sweet girl or a quiet delight. She is headstrong and canny, bold, tenacious, and _theirs_ , as sure as Peggy’s heartbeat beneath her ribs, like the stitches snugged confidently beside each other to make up the knit of a sweater.

But that doesn’t mean that time like this, just her and Steve, is unnecessary. She needed it and will always need it, to talk with her husband about the way things have been and the ways they could be better, to consider the ways their family has changed since it was just the two of them and how it might change again in the future, to share honestly how difficult these past few years have been and the things they need from each other. But she needed the time with him, too, to laugh at things no one else understands, to stand against him and hold his hand, to have all this time and all this space away from their usual life so she can take all of him - words and smile and skin - in and in and into herself.

She presses her nose against his shoulder. In the light, she has seen the pale freckles forming there. Now she smells drying salt and feels the fine crust of sand on the solid, curving bone of him.

They will drive home in another day, and she will return to her life with increased appreciation and vigor and a bit of longing sadness. The photo they had taken of the two of them in the afternoon sunshine will sit on her desk, a sweet reminder but one she cannot fully reenter.

“Will we come back?” she wants to ask Steve, but the moment feels too fine and delicate for voice. Not breakable, not really, but something to be handled with quiet and care, preserved. It was why, she realizes, she tried to tuck him beneath the sand: some kind of hold on him, a permanency she knew even as she did it was illusory. So instead they stay and listen to the water until the clouds drift away and leave the moon bright and bold overhead. Then she stands and holds out her hands to him. He takes them, bringing himself to his feet. Her careful work falls away, leaving an imprint of where he had been which will be gone before morning. Still, as they walk back together up beach and boardwalk, she can see sand hiding in crease and crevice. Even as they walk away from the sea, the grains of it still cling.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Very short this time because it was originally conceived as having two parts: the Steve and Peggy one, and then a flash to how Rose and Bucky were doing back at home that tied into Rosie's reference to Bucky's strict voice alllll the way back in chapter 9. But the tone of it came out so quiet and contained as I started that I felt that it would be pretty thrown off by having the lighter shenanigans portion of it tacked on.
> 
> This takes place September 27th, when the moon was nearly full and the weather quite warm down the Cape, even after sundown. Research!


	35. 1950

“That goddamn asshole again!”

Peggy leans up and peers at him over the back of the sofa as he slams the door to the apartment. Her hair is slightly squashed on one side, and she has the sort of marks on her cheek that indicate either that her book is so engaging that she hasn’t moved since he left or so dull that it’s lulled her to sleep.

“Well, this is a bit of a different frame of mind than when you left earlier,” she says calmly. He had gone to church that morning for the first time in a year; it’s the anniversary of his mother’s death and he knows that she’d have liked him to light a candle at least for that. His heart had been settled and a little sad as he thought how strange it was that his mother wouldn’t be even sixty years old had she lived but she has been gone from him now for circular decades. “I assume this means that you’ve seen the neighborhood menace once again?”

Steve strips off his suit jacket with more violence than he normally would: not so he tears the seams, but enough that his elbow gets stuck and he has to slow down to extricate himself more deliberately. He collapses into the armchair, fabric crumpling between his clenching fists.

“He nearly ran over Iris. While she was pushing the baby,” Steve says, voice low. “And she was on the sidewalk. Everyone walks in the street around here.”

She sits up properly. “Did Officer Miles see this time?”

“Cigarette break. As usual.” The fury is becoming something molten within him, boiling itself over uselessly. “Waste of a badge. If I was still—If I could just—”

“Steve,” she interrupts with sharp intent. “If you can’t do some good simply because you don’t have a badge in hand, then I’m not certain I know you.”

“Right,” Steve says, because she is. “Right.” And he goes to change out of his suit.

* * *

People in their neighborhood don’t have much call for cars of their own. Sure, there are some around, but for the majority, buses and streetcars can take them the places they need to go, and where would everyone park them if they did have them?

The car they saw come through most often, or perhaps only noticed most often, was driven by a man everyone had started calling That Devil.

That Devil was perhaps thirty, with a rounded face and slicked-back blond hair. Instead of seeming cherubic, there was an animal squint to his eyes which changed your consideration of him on sight.

That Devil’s car was a green roadster, nearly new except for the wear which he had put on it, because That Devil drove the city streets not as if he were being chased but as if he was the one doing the chasing. The problem wasn’t even so much his disregard of traffic laws as it was his disdain for laws of common sense and humanity: he screeched his way around corners on a diagonal, came close to the edges of sidewalks if not actually atop them, seemed not to see pedestrians no matter how colorfully they dressed or how loudly they shouted. His speed, his recklessness, did not seem pointed or purposefully malicious but instead the product of a lack of care for those around him, as if he simply couldn’t be bothered with the people in his way.

Regardless of his reasons or lack thereof, he was a menace. He was making Steve’s neighbors unsafe. Steve wouldn’t stand for it anymore.

* * *

The following Wednesday, Peggy is coming home from work when she hears someone call her name. Mabel, who owns the butcher shop with her husband Frankie and her sister Marceline and Marceline's husband George, waves her down. She comes out wrapped in a heavy sweater against the evening drop in temperature and holding a full brown paper bag on her hip.

“Your man was in here an hour ago,” she starts, watching Peggy with keen eyes. Mabel always knows everything that is going on with everyone around, or tries to. “George was wrapping up his stew meat and I was finishing with him at the register and all of a sudden we hear the sound of That Devil starting down the street. And your Grant asks me to hold his meat and keep the rest of his shopping behind the counter - and he certainly is polite, mind you - but then he just takes off down the street after That Devil.” Peggy looks mildly back at her without comment, so Mabel continues, more pointedly, “I’ve never seen someone run so fast.”

 _And I suspect that you haven’t even seen the most that you could have_ , Peggy thinks, but aloud she says casually, “Yes, he’s something of an athlete,” and holds out her arms for the grocery bag.

* * *

She’s been quite exhausted lately - apparently building an international espionage organization is not for the faint of heart - so after she’s put the food away, she lies down for a brief nap. When she wakes up and comes out to the kitchen, Steve is standing by the counter, roughly chopping a red pepper. He scrapes the pieces onto a tray of already cut tomatoes and onions and slides it into the oven (she liked the roasted tomato soup recipe he tried last week so much that she’d asked him to make it again) and smiles over his shoulder at her.

“Did you catch him up?” she asks from the doorway.

“I did.” Even with his back turned as he reaches a saucepan and frying pan from the cabinet, she can hear the satisfaction in his voice. “He lives in Georgetown. Nice house. Rich parents. We had a talk.”

“And he won’t be coming around here again?”

Steve sets the cookware on the stovetop, leaning against it as he turns to face her. “He did try to give me the ‘I know every cop in town, my dad’s friends with J. Edgar, they won’t lift a finger’ line, but I think he understands now that if he keeps acting the way that he has been, in this city or anywhere else, it won’t be a matter of bringing in authorities. Unless he’s more of a fool than I’d pegged him for, he should be much less dangerous to himself and others from now on.”

She watches him with care as he speaks. How different he is from when she first knew him, slightly lined now, with more of a solidity to his shoulders and jaw, the set of his feet, a settledness in his eyes that speaks of other lives seen and sampled and put intentionally aside. How similar he is, going on an unplanned chase because those who did wrong should not escape justice.

At least he was - presumably - wearing shoes this time around. And appropriately sized clothes.

“You realize that had you simply caught a glimpse of the registration plate, I could have found the address without you putting one of your less explicable talents on display in front of everyone,” she points out.

Steve nods his head, conceding the point. He does not make excuses about not having thought of that, or not wanting to involve or trouble her. Instead he says thoughtfully, “I think I needed to do something like this. It’s been a while since I’ve been able to make something right, and I guess I wanted to show myself that I still could. No orders, no tech, no supernatural crisis, no world hanging in the balance, just a chance to help things get a little bit better, a little bit safer.” He folds his arms against himself. “Bucky’s still out there - I know we’re waiting on intel to fill in the blanks of what I remembered but it’s taking longer than I would have hoped - and we still have Hydra to handle, and all the business with the USSR, but today I was able to do this.”

“And tomorrow you’ll carry Iris’s bags while she pushes the baby, and help Mr. Hancock reorganize his high shelves so he doesn’t have to get on the ladder at his age, and sit with me to work out our next steps. And I have faith that you will continue to do all of that and more.” She gives a small and true smile. “My faith in you has rarely been misplaced.”

“Rarely?”

“The preparations appear to have stalled although I _was_ promised supper at some point tonight.”

He laughs. “And you’ll get it, even if the timeline’s a little off.” He indicates a chair and goes to get out butter and milk, ham and cheese. “You’ve heard about my day. Come tell me about yours.”

“Well, I wasn’t involved in any footchases,” she says, coming completely into the warmth, “so I don’t know that it was as exciting as yours.” (She’s found herself surprised by how little she misses fieldwork, how much her current role fulfils her even as overwhelming as it is. And it helps that she can assign herself something more hands-on if she chooses to.)

“Then again—” She takes a seat and puts her feet up, watching him squint at the scrap of paper with the scrawled-down directions for croque-monsieur which Dernier had included in his last letter, trying to convince her that it was easy enough for even Peggy to attempt. “I work adjacent to the government, so I deal with devils of a sort nearly every day and usually can’t simply threaten them into behaving better. Though,” she adds with mock thoughtfulness, “it is quite satisfying when I can.”

He laughs, shoulders shaking a bit as he starts grating cheese, and she smiles for it, settling in for another evening of conversation and food and joy with him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This came out a little more muddled than I would have hoped, but maybe still cute? Also, I clearly am a writer who interprets "you should set the scene a little more instead of just having talking and Emotion" as "you should mention some food."


End file.
